Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
11-2020
Abstract
The selection of third-party libraries is an essential element of virtually any software development project. However, deciding which libraries to choose is a challenging practical problem. Selecting the wrong library can severely impact a software project in terms of cost, time, and development effort, with the severity of the impact depending on the role of the library in the software architecture, among others. Despite the importance of following a careful library selection process, in practice, the selection of third-party libraries is still conducted in an ad-hoc manner, where dozens of factors play an influential role in the decision. In this paper, we study the factors that influence the selection process of libraries, as perceived by industry developers. To that aim, we perform a cross-sectional interview study with 16 developers from 11 different businesses and survey 115 developers that are involved in the selection of libraries. We systematically devised a comprehensive set of 26 technical, human, and economic factors that developers take into consideration when selecting a software library. Eight of these factors are new to the literature. We explain each of these factors and how they play a role in the decision. Finally, we discuss the implications of our work to library maintainers, potential library users, package manager developers, and empirical software engineering researchers.
Keywords
software libraries, APIs, library adoption, library selection, empirical software engineering
Discipline
Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
ESEC/FSE '20: Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering: Virtual, November 8-13
First Page
245
Last Page
256
ISBN
9781450370431
Identifier
10.1145/3368089.3409711
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Citation
VARGAS, Enrique Larios; ANICHE, Maurício; TREUDE, Christoph; BRUNTINK, Magiel; and GOUSIOS, Georgios.
Selecting third-party libraries: The practitioners' perspective. (2020). ESEC/FSE '20: Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering: Virtual, November 8-13. 245-256.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8910
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3368089.3409711