Title
Identify Impacts of Evolving Third Party Components on Long-Living Software Systems
Abstract
Integrating 3rd party components in software systems provides promising advantages but also risks due to disconnected evolution cycles. Deciding whether to migrate to a newer version of a 3rd party component integrated into selfimplemented code or to switch to a different one is challenging. Dedicated evolution support for 3rd party component scenarios is hence required. Existing approaches do not account for open source components which allow accessing and analyzing their source code and project information. The approach presented in this paper combines analyses for code dependency, code quality, and bug tracker information for a holistic view on the evolution with 3rd party components. We applied the approach in a case study on a communication middleware component for industrial devices used at ABB. We identified 7 methods potentially impacted by changes of 3rd party components despite the absence of interface changes. We further identified selfimplemented code that does not need any manual investigation after the 3rd party component evolution as well as a positive trend of code and bug tracker issues.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/CSMR.2012.59
CSMR
Keywords
Field
DocType
disconnected evolution cycle,code dependency,evolving third party components,identify impacts,source code,code quality,party component,communication middleware component,selfimplemented code,dedicated evolution support,long-living software systems,party component scenario,party component evolution,benchmark testing,reliability,databases,middleware,software systems,computer bugs
Middleware,Software engineering,Source code,Computer science,Software bug,Software system,Third party,Software quality,Benchmark (computing)
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1944-2793
7
0.88
References 
Authors
3
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Benjamin Klatt1535.70
Zoya Durdik2737.28
Heiko Koziolek3140375.87
Klaus Krogmann425318.17
Johannes Stammel51707.62
Roland Weiss6728.98