Can we trust tests to automate dependency updates?: A case study of Java Projects

Developers are increasingly using services such as Dependabot to automate dependency updates. However, recent research has shown that developers perceive such services as unreliable, as they heavily rely on test coverage to detect conflicts in updates. To understand the prevalence of tests exercising dependencies, we calculate the test...

Präzi: from package-based to call-based dependency networks

Modern programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, and Rust encourage software reuse by hosting diverse and fast-growing repositories of highly interdependent packages (i.e., reusable libraries) for their users. The standard way to study the interdependence between software packages is to infer a package dependency network by parsing...

Dependency Solving Is Still Hard, but We Are Getting Better at It

Dependency solving is a hard (NP-complete) problem in all non-trivial component models due to either mutually incompatible versions of the same packages or explicitly declared package conflicts. As such, software upgrade planning needs to rely on highly specialized dependency solvers, lest falling into pitfalls such as incompleteness - a...