Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

11-2018

Abstract

Modern software systems are increasingly dependent on third-party libraries. It is widely recognized that using mature and well-tested third-party libraries can improve developers’ productivity, reduce time-to-market, and produce more reliable software. Today’s open-source repositories provide a wide range of libraries that can be freely downloaded and used. However, as software libraries are documented separately but intended to be used together, developers are unlikely to fully take advantage of these reuse opportunities. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically identify third-party library usage patterns, i.e., collections of libraries that are commonly used together by developers. Our approach employs a hierarchical clustering technique to group together software libraries based on external client usage. To evaluate our approach, we mined a large set of over 6000 popular libraries from Maven Central Repository and investigated their usage by over 38,000 client systems from the Github repository. Our experiments show that our technique is able to detect the majority (77%) of highly consistent and cohesive library usage patterns across a considerable number of client systems.

Keywords

Software libraries, Software reuse, Clustering, Usage patterns

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Journal of Systems and Software

Volume

145

First Page

164

Last Page

179

ISSN

0164-1212

Identifier

10.1016/j.jss.2018.08.032

Publisher

Elsevier

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2018.08.032

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