Semantic versioning versus breaking changes: A study of the Maven Repository

For API users, backward compatibility of new releases is important, as it permits safe and fast upgrading when the new release becomes available. To signal safe upgrading, version naming schemes such as semantic versioning provide strict rules on major (breaking changes permitted) versus minor and patch (no breaking changes permitted) releases....

Testing principles, current practices, and effects of change localization

Preprint of a paper presented at: MSR 2013, The 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, May 18–19, 2013, San Francisco, California, USA.

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...