Detecting Breaking Changes in JavaScript APIs
J.C.M. Kraaijeveld (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Maurício Aniche – Mentor
C Hauff – Graduation committee member
Alberto Bacchelli – Graduation committee member
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Abstract
The goal of this thesis is to explore the current possibilities for detecting breaking changes in JavaScript. For this, we propose an approach and show its accuracy by constructing a tool and evaluating it. The evaluation is carried out on 3 chosen JavaScript projects and a total of 3000 consumer packages. For each of the projects, we compute the precision and recall rates. Furthermore, an empirical study is carried out on the 3000 consumer packages to see the effects of breaking changes on developers. The results show that we are able to detect between 43% and 80% of breaking changes. The outcome of the empirical study suggests that breaking changes appear quite often between versions, and even in versions that should not contain them according to the rules for semantic versioning. Additionally, we show the current limitations of our approach and how they can be improved upon in future research.