Origin, Impact and Cost of Interface Instability

Third-party libraries are used frequently in modern software development. Websites that are visited millions of times a day often make heavy use of open-source software libraries. As a software developer, using these libraries has a number of advantages. Developers save time and effort because functionality does not have to be rebuilt from...

Measuring Library Stability Through Historical Version Analysis

Preprint of paper published in: ICSM 2012 - Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, 23-28 September 2012; doi:10.1109/ICSM.2012.6405296 Backward compatibility is a major concern for any library developer. In this paper, we evaluate how stable a set of frequently used third-party libraries is in terms of method...