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The robustness of npm dependency network is a crucial property, since many projects and web applications heavily rely on the functionalities of packages, especially popular ones that have many dependant packages. In the past, there have…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2021-10-25 Andrej Hafner , Anže Mur , Jaka Bernard

Reusing third-party software packages is a common practice in software development. As the scale and complexity of open-source software (OSS) projects continue to grow (e.g., Linux distributions), the number of reused third-party packages…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Dongming Jin , Nianyu Li , Kai Yang , Minghui Zhou , Zhi Jin

Complex software systems have a network of dependencies. Developers often configure package managers (e.g., npm) to automatically update dependencies with each publication of new releases containing bug fixes and new features. When a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Daniel Venturini , Filipe Roseiro Cogo , Ivanilton Polato , Marco A Gerosa , Igor Scaliante Wiese

Background: Open source requires participation of volunteer and commercial developers (users) in order to deliver functional high-quality components. Developers both contribute effort in the form of patches and demand effort from the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Tapajit Dey , Yuxing Ma , Audris Mockus

As modern software extensively uses open source packages, developers regularly pull in new upstream code through frequent updates. While a manual review of all upstream changes may not be practical, developers may rely on the authors' and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Nasif Imtiaz , Preya Shabrina , Laurie Williams

The Node.js Package Manager (i.e., npm) archive repository serves as a critical part of the JavaScript community and helps support one of the largest developer ecosystems in the world. However, as a developer, selecting an appropriate npm…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Bodin Chinthanet , Brittany Reid , Christoph Treude , Markus Wagner , Raula Gaikovina Kula , Takashi Ishio , Kenichi Matsumoto

Developers rely on open-source packages and must review dependencies to safeguard against vulnerable or malicious upstream code. A careful review of all dependencies changes often does not occur in practice. Therefore, developers need…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Sivana Hamer , Nasif Imtiaz , Mahzabin Tamanna , Preya Shabrina , Laurie Williams

Trivial packages, small modules with low functionality, are common in the npm ecosystem and can pose security risks despite their simplicity. This paper refines existing definitions and introduce data-only packages that contain no…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Napasorn Tevarut , Brittany Reid , Yutaro Kashiwa , Pattara Leelaprute , Arnon Rungsawang , Bundit Manaskasemsak , Hajimu Iida

Breaking changes cause a lot of effort to both downstream and upstream developers: downstream developers need to adapt to breaking changes and upstream developers are responsible for identifying and documenting them. In the NPM ecosystem,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Dezhen Kong , Jiakun Liu , Lingfeng Bao , David Lo

Package managers have become a vital part of the modern software development process. They allow developers to reuse third-party code, share their own code, minimize their codebase, and simplify the build process. However, recent reports…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Ruian Duan , Omar Alrawi , Ranjita Pai Kasturi , Ryan Elder , Brendan Saltaformaggio , Wenke Lee

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

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

Code reuse is an important part of software development. The adoption of code reuse practices is especially common among Node.js developers. The Node.js package manager, NPM, indexes over 1 Million packages and developers often seek out…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-01-03 Brittany Reid , Marcelo d`Amorim , Markus Wagner , Christoph Treude

Current software supply chains heavily rely on open-source packages hosted in public repositories. Given the popularity of ecosystems like npm and PyPI, malicious users started to spread malware by publishing open-source packages containing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Piergiorgio Ladisa , Serena Elisa Ponta , Nicola Ronzoni , Matias Martinez , Olivier Barais

Open-source software (OSS) plays a crucial role in modern software development. Utilizing OSS code can greatly accelerate software development, reduce redundancy, and enhance reliability. Python, a widely adopted programming language, is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Zhiqing Zhong , Shilin He , Haoxuan Wang , Boxi Yu , Haowen Yang , Pinjia He

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

Security vulnerability in third-party dependencies is a growing concern not only for developers of the affected software, but for the risks it poses to an entire software ecosystem, e.g., Heartbleed vulnerability. Recent studies show that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Bodin Chinthanet , Raula Gaikovina Kula , Shane McIntosh , Takashi Ishio , Akinori Ihara , Kenichi Matsumoto

Despite the importance of scientific software for research, it is often not formally recognized and rewarded. This is especially true for foundational libraries, which are hidden below packages visible to the users (and thus doubly hidden,…

Software vulnerabilities have a large negative impact on the software systems that we depend on daily. Reports on software vulnerabilities always paint a grim picture, with some reports showing that 83% of organizations depend on vulnerable…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Mahmoud Alfadel , Diego Elias Costa , Mouafak Mokhallalati , Emad Shihab , Bram Adams

In recent years, defect prediction has received a great deal of attention in the empirical software engineering world. Predicting software defects before the maintenance phase is very important not only to decrease the maintenance costs but…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-31 Ahmet Okutan