On the relation of method popularity to breaking changes in the Maven ecosystem

Software reuse is a common practice in modern software engineering to save time and energy while accelerating software delivery. Dependency managers like MAVEN offer a large ecosystem of reusable libraries that build the backbone of software reuse. Breaking changes, i.e., when an update to a library introduces incompatible changes that break...

API evolution on Maven Central: do developers adhere to semantic versioning?

In this paper, we investigate whether developers of artifacts on Maven Central adhere to semantic versioning. We also investigate whether there is a link between violations in semantic versioning and the popularity of the violating method. Developers can violate semantic versioning by removing or altering methods in their API, which we refer to...