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The Maven Central Repository provides an extraordinary source of data to understand complex architecture and evolution phenomena among Java applications. As of September 6, 2018, this repository includes 2.8M artifacts (compiled piece of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-01-17 Amine Benelallam , Nicolas Harrand , César Soto Valero , Benoit Baudry , Olivier Barais

As modern software development increasingly relies on reusable libraries and components, managing dependencies has become critical for ensuring software stability and security. However, challenges such as outdated dependencies, missed…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Barisha Chowdhury , Md Fazle Rabbi , S. M. Mahedy Hasan , Minhaz F. Zibran

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

Library dependencies in software ecosystems play a crucial role in the development of software. As newer releases of these libraries are published, developers may opt to pin their dependencies to a particular version. While pinning may have…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Vasudev Vikram , Yuvraj Agarwal , Rohan Padhye

Popular (re)use of third-party open-source software (OSS) is evidence of the impact of hosting repositories like maven on software development today. Updating libraries is crucial, with recent studies highlighting the associated…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-09-15 Raula Gaikovina Kula , Coen De Roover , Daniel M. German , Takashi Ishio , Katsuro Inoue

The R package ecosystem is expanding fast and dependencies among packages in the ecosystem are becoming more complex. In this study, we explored the package dependencies from a new aspect. We applied a new metric named "dependency…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-01-09 Zuguang Gu

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

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 software ecosystems exhibit dense dependency networks in which maintenance degradation of structurally central packages can propagate widely. Despite increasing attention to open source sustainability, existing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Alexandros Tsakpinis , Emil Schwenger , Alexander Pretschner

Third-party libraries with rich functionalities facilitate the fast development of Node.js software, but also bring new security threats that vulnerabilities could be introduced through dependencies. In particular, the threats could be…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Chengwei Liu , Sen Chen , Lingling Fan , Bihuan Chen , Yang Liu , Xin Peng

Reusing existing solutions in the form of third-party libraries is common practice when writing software. Package managers are used to manage dependencies to third-party libraries by automating the process of installing and updating the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Kristiina Rahkema , Dietmar Pfahl , Rudolf Ramler

Background: Widespread use of third-party libraries makes ecosystems like Node Package Manager (npm) critical to modern software development. However, this interconnected chain of dependencies also creates challenges: bugs in one library…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Mohammadreza Saeidi , Ethan Thoma , Raula Gaikovina Kula , Gema Rodríguez-Pérez

Third party libraries are used to integrate existing solutions for common problems and help speed up development. The use of third party libraries, however, can carry risks, for example through vulnerabilities in these libraries. Studying…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Kristiina Rahkema , Dietmar Pfahl

Based on the empirical analysis of the dependency network in 18 Java projects, we develop a novel model of network growth which considers both: an attachment mechanism and the addition of new nodes with a heterogeneous distribution of their…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-05-19 Claudio J. Tessone , Markus M. Geipel , F. Schweitzer

Large language models (LLMs) have developed rapidly in recent years, revolutionizing various fields. Despite their widespread success, LLMs heavily rely on external code dependencies from package management systems, creating a complex and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Shuhan Liu , Xing Hu , Xin Xia , David Lo , Xiaohu Yang

Security vulnerabilities introduced by applications using third-party dependencies are on the increase, caused by the emergence of large ecosystems of libraries such as the NPM packages for JavaScript. Nowadays, libraries depend on each…

Popular adoption of third-party libraries for contemporary software development has led to the creation of large inter-dependency networks, where sustainability issues of a single library can have widespread network effects. Maintainers of…

Dependency management systems are a critical component in software development, enabling projects to incorporate existing functionality efficiently. However, misconfigurations and malicious actors in these systems pose severe security…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-29 David Schmidt , Sebastian Schrittwieser , Edgar Weippl

Recent high-profile incidents in open-source software have greatly raised practitioner attention on software supply chain attacks. To guard against potential malicious package updates, security practitioners advocate pinning dependency to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Hao He , Bogdan Vasilescu , Christian Kästner

With the rise of the library ecosystem (such as NPM for JavaScript and PyPI for Python), a developer has access to a multitude of library packages that they can adopt as dependencies into their application.Prior work has found that these…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Supatsara Wattanakriengkrai , Christoph Treude , Raula Gaikovina Kula