Breaking-Good: Explaining Breaking Dependency Updates with Build Analysis
2024 (English)In: Proceedings - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, SCAM 2024, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2024, p. 36-46Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Dependency updates often cause compilation errors when new dependency versions introduce changes that are incompatible with existing client code. Fixing breaking dependency updates is notoriously hard, as their root cause can be hidden deep in the dependency tree. We present Breaking-Good, a tool that automatically generates explanations for breaking updates. Breaking-Good provides a detailed categorization of compilation errors, identifying several factors related to changes in direct and indirect dependencies, incompatibilities between Java versions, and client-specific configuration. With a blended analysis of log and dependency trees, Breaking-Good generates detailed explanations for each breaking update. These explanations help developers understand the causes of the breaking update, and suggest possible actions to fix the breakage. We evaluate Breaking-Good on 243 real-world breaking dependency updates. Our results indicate that Breaking-Good accurately identifies root causes and generates automatic explanations for 70 % of these breaking updates. Our user study demonstrates that the generated explanations help developers. Breaking-Good is the first technique that automatically identifies the causes of a breaking dependency update and explains the breakage accordingly.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2024. p. 36-46
Keywords [en]
Breaking dependency updates, Explanations, Java, Maven, Software Dependency
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-359246DOI: 10.1109/SCAM63643.2024.00014Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85215290586OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-359246DiVA, id: diva2:1932571
Conference
24th IEEE International Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, SCAM 2024, Flagstaff, United States of America, October 7-8, 2024
Funder
Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, chains
Note
Part of ISBN 9798331528508
QC 20250203
2025-01-292025-01-292025-02-25Bibliographically approved