Semantic versioning and impact of breaking changes in the Maven repository

Systems that depend on third-party libraries may have to be updated when updates to these libraries become available in order to benefit from new functionality, security patches, bug fixes, or API improvements. However, often such changes come with changes to the existing interfaces of these libraries, possibly causing rework on the client...

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...

Refactoring Fat Interfaces Using a Genetic Algorithm

Recent studies have shown that the violation of the Interface Segregation Principle (ISP) is critical for maintaining and evolving software systems. Fat interfaces (i.e., interfaces violating the ISP) change more frequently and degrade the quality of the components coupled to them. According to the ISP the interfaces’ design should force no...

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...