Supporting the evolution of software ecosystems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Modern software systems today are increasingly being built by gluing together various reusable software components (aka libraries or packages). These software components that provide developers with multiple functionalities are often published on what is known as software ecosystems. Recent industry reports show that code reused from third parties is four times the amount of code being developed in-house. However, exploiting such rich software ecosystems and depending on them is far from trivial due to the drastic interdependence among individual components in these ecosystems. For example, one simple issue introduced in a single component in an ecosystem may lead to the crash of thousands of other components in the ecosystem and result in the crashing of the software systems that depend on these components. On the flip side, developers need to regularly update their used components with new functionalities and bug or security fixes; but they should avoid introducing breaking changes too frequently as this imposes an extra burden on them. These observations show that new techniques and approaches are urgently needed to support the evolution and maintenance of software ecosystems. The long-term goal of this research program is to create innovative methods and techniques that provide automated support for the evolution of software ecosystems. The short-term goal of this research program will be carried out along two objectives: (1) studying the component-level risky changes that negatively impact the whole ecosystem or part of it (e.g., a change in an individual component that leads to the crashing of other dependent components in the ecosystem) and (2) investigating and developing approaches to automatically update the dependencies of software systems and provide fixes if needed. In this research proposal, both quantitative and qualitative research methods will be used to systematically analyze the large-scale datasets of software ecosystems, propose pragmatic solutions to support the overall evolution of software ecosystems, and understand the software ecosystem developers' perspectives about the proposed solutions. The outcomes of this proposed research will provide essential insights and tool support to reduce the growing software maintenance costs and increase developers' productivity, thereby contributing to improving our software industry. Furthermore, the proposed research will expose, train and enable highly qualified personnel (HQP) to contribute to the state-of-the-art in software research.