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Package managers such as NPM have become essential for software development. The NPM repository hosts over 2 million packages and serves over 43 billion downloads every week. Unfortunately, the NPM dependency solver has several…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-25 Donald Pinckney , Federico Cassano , Arjun Guha , Jon Bell , Massimiliano Culpo , Todd Gamblin

One of the biggest strength of many modern programming languages is their rich open source package ecosystem. Indeed, modern language-specific package managers have made it much easier to share reusable code and depend on components written…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-04-08 Théo Zimmermann

As the default package manager for Node.js, npm has become one of the largest package management systems in the world. To facilitate dependency management for developers, npm supports a special type of dependency, Peer Dependency, whose…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Xingyu Wang , Mingsen Wang , Wenbo Shen , Rui Chang

Providing high quality software and evaluating the software reliability in softwarized networks are crucial for vendors and customers. These networks rely on open source code, which are sensitive to contain high number of bugs. Both, the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-01 Hasan Yagiz Ozkan , Madeleine Kaufmann , Wolfgang Kellerer , Carmen Mas-Machuca

Software systems often leverage on open source software libraries to reuse functionalities. Such libraries are readily available through software package managers like npm for JavaScript. Due to the huge amount of packages available in such…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-02-27 Ahmed Zerouali , Tom Mens , Gregorio Robles , Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona

The rise of user-contributed Open Source Software (OSS) ecosystems demonstrate their prevalence in the software engineering discipline. Libraries work together by depending on each other across the ecosystem. From these ecosystems emerges a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-09-15 Raula Gaikovina Kula , Ali Ouni , Daniel M. German , Katsuro Inoue

Fixing bugs is an important phase in software development and maintenance. In practice, the process of bug fixing may conflict with the release schedule. Such confliction leads to a trade-off between software quality and release schedule,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-04-18 Jifeng Xuan , Yan Hu , He Jiang

Agile teams juggle multiple tasks so professionals are often assigned to multiple projects, especially in service organizations that monitor and maintain a large suite of software for a large user base. If we could predict changes in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-09-07 Rahul Krishna , Amritanshu Agrawal , Akond Rahman , Alexander Sobran , Tim Menzies

The rapid evolution of software libraries creates a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), whose static parametric knowledge often becomes stale post-training. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is commonly used to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Ahmed Nusayer Ashik , Shaowei Wang , Tse-Hsun Chen , Muhammad Asaduzzaman , Yuan Tian

Python software development heavily relies on third-party packages. Direct and transitive dependencies create a labyrinth of software supply chains. While it is convenient to reuse code, vulnerabilities within these dependency chains can…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Jacob Mahon , Chenxi Hou , Zhihao Yao

The management of third-party package dependencies is crucial to most technology stacks, with package managers acting as brokers to ensure that a verified package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-08-16 Syful Islam , Raula Gaikovina Kula , Christoph Treude , Bodin Chinthanet , Takashi Ishio , Kenichi Matsumoto

While open-source software has enabled significant levels of reuse to speed up software development, it has also given rise to the dreadful dependency hell that all software practitioners face on a regular basis. This article provides a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Tom Mens , Alexandre Decan

The use of third-party packages is becoming increasingly popular and has led to the emergence of large software package ecosystems with a maze of inter-dependencies. Since the reliance on these ecosystems enables developers to reduce…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Raula Gaikovina Kula , Katsuro Inoue , Christoph Treude

Modern software systems are expected to be secure and contain all the latest features, even when new versions of software are released multiple times an hour. Each system may include many interacting packages. The problem of installing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-11-15 Ran Ben Basat , Maayan Goldstein , Itai Segall

Deep learning (DL) applications, built upon a heterogeneous and complex DL stack (e.g., Nvidia GPU, Linux, CUDA driver, Python runtime, and TensorFlow), are subject to software and hardware dependencies across the DL stack. One challenge in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Kaifeng Huang , Bihuan Chen , Susheng Wu , Junmin Cao , Lei Ma , Xin Peng

Maintaining software is an ongoing process that stretches beyond the initial release. Stable software versions continuously evolve to fix bugs, add improvements, address security issues, and ensure compatibility. This ongoing support…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Jarin Tasnim , Debasish Chakroborti , Chanchal K. Roy , Kevin A. Schneider

Social network research has focused on hyperlink graphs, bibliographic citations, friend/follow patterns, influence spread, etc. Large software repositories also form a highly valuable networked artifact, usually in the form of a collection…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-01-22 Rima Hazra , Hardik Aggarwal , Pawan Goyal , Animesh Mukherjee , Soumen Chakrabarti

Modern software development frequently uses third-party packages, raising the concern of supply chain security attacks. Many attackers target popular package managers, like npm, and their users with supply chain attacks. In 2021 there was a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Nusrat Zahan , Thomas Zimmermann , Patrice Godefroid , Brendan Murphy , Chandra Maddila , Laurie Williams

As software systems grow in complexity, accurately identifying and managing dependencies among changes becomes increasingly critical. For instance, a change that leverages a function must depend on the change that introduces it.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Ali Arabat , Mohammed Sayagh , Jameleddine Hassine

Open-source software (OSS) greatly facilitates program development for developers. However, the high number of vulnerabilities in open-source software is a major concern, including in Golang, a relatively new programming language. In…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Jinchang Hu , Lyuye Zhang , Chengwei Liu , Sen Yang , Song Huang , Yang Liu