Paper Info
Title
An Empirical Analysis of Technical Lag in npm Package Dependencies.
Abstract
Software library packages are constantly evolving and increasing in number. Not updating to the latest available release of dependent libraries may negatively affect software development by not benefiting from new functionality, vulnerability and bug fixes available in more recent versions. On the other hand, automatically updating to the latest release may introduce incompatibility issues. We introduce a technical lag metric for dependencies in package networks, in order to assess how outdated a software package is compared to the latest available releases of its dependencies. We empirically analyse the package update practices and technical lag for the npm distribution of JavaScript packages. Our results show a strong presence of technical lag caused by the specific use of dependency constraints, indicating a reluctance to update dependencies to avoid backward incompatible changes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1007/978-3-319-90421-4_6
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
Software library,Technical lag,Package dependency,npm
Software engineering,Computer science,Software,Lag,Software development,Vulnerability,JavaScript
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
10826
0302-9743
11
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.56
12
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ahmed Zerouali1241.81
Eleni Constantinou2859.67
Tom Mens33018181.32
Gregorio Robles4129491.67
Jesús M. González-barahona546235.96