Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

10-2021

Abstract

The management of third-party package dependencies is crucial to most technology stacks, with package managers acting as brokers to ensure that a verified package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to dozens of package ecosystems with their own management features. While recent studies have shown that developers struggle to migrate their dependencies, the common assumption is that package ecosystems are used without any issue. In this study, we explore 13 package ecosystems to understand whether their features correlate with the experience of their users. By studying experience through the questions that developers ask on the question-and-answer site Stack Overflow, we find that developer questions are grouped into three themes (i.e., Package management, Input-Output, and Package Usage). Our preliminary analysis indicates that specific features are correlated with the user experience. Our work lays out future directions to investigate the trade-offs involved in designing the ideal package ecosystem.

Keywords

Package Manager, Stack Overflow, Third-Party Package

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Luxembourg City, 2021 September 27- October 1

First Page

664

Last Page

668

ISBN

9781665428828

Identifier

10.1109/ICSME52107.2021.00077

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME52107.2021.00077

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