Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

1-2025

Abstract

JavaScript libraries are characterized by their widespread use, frequent code changes, and a high tolerance for backward incompatible changes. Awareness of such breaking changes can help developers adapt to version updates and avoid negative impacts. Several tools have been targeted to or can be used to detect breaking change detection in the JavaScript community. However, these tools detect breaking changes using different ways, and there are currently no systematic reviews of these approaches. From a preliminary study on popular JavaScript libraries, we find that existing approaches, including simple regression testing, model-based testing and type differencing cannot detect many breaking changes but can produce plenty of false positives. We discuss the reasons for missing breaking changes and producing false positives.Based on the insights from our findings, we propose a new approach named Diagnose that iteratively constructs an object relation graph based on API exploration and forced execution-based type analysis. Diagnose then refine the graphs and reconstruct the graphs in the newer versions of the libraries to detect breaking changes. By evaluating approach on the same set of libraries used in the empirical study, we find that Diagnose can detect much more breaking changes (60.2%) and produce fewer false positives. Therefore, Diagnose is suitable for practical use.

Keywords

JavaScript, Breaking Changes, NPM

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering

Volume

2

Issue

ISSTA

First Page

2340

Last Page

2361

Identifier

10.1145/3728980

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Copyright Owner and License

Authors-CC-BY

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3728980

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