Understanding the Impact of APIs Behavioral Breaking Changes on Client Applications
Libraries play a significant role in software development as they provide reusable functionality, which helps expedite the development process. As libraries evolve, they release new versions with optimisations like new functionality, bug fixes, and patches for known security vulnerabilities. To obtain these optimisations, the client applications that depend on these libraries must update to use the latest version. However, this can cause software failures in the clients if the update includes breaking changes. These breaking changes can be divided into syntactic and semantic (behavioral) breaking changes. While there has been considerable research on syntactic breaking changes introduced between library updates and their impact on client projects, there is a notable lack of research regarding behavioral breaking changes introduced during library updates and their impacts on clients. We conducted an empirical analysis to identify the impact behavioral breaking changes have on clients by examining the impact of dependency updates on client test suites. We examined a set of java projects built using Maven, which included 30,548 dependencies under 8,086 Maven artifacts. We automatically updated out-of-date dependencies and ran the client test suites. We found that 2.30% of these updates had behavioral breaking changes that impacted client tests. Our results show that most breaking changes were introduced during a non-Major dependency update, violating the semantic versioning scheme. We further analyzed the effects these behavioral breaking changes have on client tests. We present a taxonomy of effects related to these changes, which we broadly categorize as Test Failures and Test Errors. Our results further indicate that the library developers did not adequately document the exceptions thrown due to precondition violations.
Fri 19 JulDisplayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change
10:30 - 11:00 | |||
10:30 30mPoster | Understanding the Impact of APIs Behavioral Breaking Changes on Client Applications Posters Dhanushka Jayasuriya University of Auckland, Valerio Terragni University of Auckland, Jens Dietrich Victoria University of Wellington, Kelly Blincoe University of Auckland | ||
10:30 30mPoster | Your Code Secret Belongs to Me: Neural Code Completion Tools Can Memorize Hard-coded Credentials Posters Yizhan Huang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Yichen LI The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Weibin Wu Sun Yat-sen University, Jianping Zhang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Michael Lyu The Chinese University of Hong Kong | ||
10:30 30mPoster | Natural Is The Best: Model-Agnostic Code Simplification for Pre-trained Large Language Models Posters Yan Wang Central University of Finance and Economics, Xiaoning Li Central University of Finance and Economics, Tien N. Nguyen University of Texas at Dallas, Shaohua Wang Central University of Finance and Economics, Chao Ni School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University, Ling Ding Central University of Finance and Economics | ||
10:30 30mPoster | PyRadar: Towards Automatically Retrieving and Validating Source Code Repository Information for PyPI Packages Posters Kai Gao University of Science and Technology Beijing, Weiwei Xu Peking University, Wenhao Yang Peking University, Minghui Zhou Peking University | ||
10:30 30mPoster | "The Law Doesn’t Work Like a Computer": Exploring Software Licensing Issues Faced by Legal Practitioners Posters Nathan Wintersgill William & Mary, Trevor Stalnaker William & Mary, Laura A. Heymann William & Mary, Oscar Chaparro William & Mary, Denys Poshyvanyk William & Mary | ||
10:30 30mPoster | RavenBuild: Context, Relevance, and Dependency Aware Build Outcome Prediction Posters Gengyi Sun University of Waterloo, Sarra Habchi Ubisoft Montréal, Shane McIntosh University of Waterloo | ||
10:30 30mPoster | MirrorFair: Fixing Fairness Bugs in Machine Learning Software via Counterfactual Predictions Posters Ying Xiao King's College London / Southern University of Science and Technology, Jie M. Zhang King's College London, Yepang Liu Southern University of Science and Technology, Mohammad Reza Mousavi King's College London, Sicen Liu Southern University of Science and Technology, Dingyuan Xue Southern University of Science and Technology | ||
10:30 30mPoster | Do Code Generation Models Think Like Us? - A Study of Attention Alignment between Large Language Models and Human Programmers Posters Bonan Kou Purdue University, Shengmai Chen Purdue University, Zhijie Wang University of Alberta, Lei Ma The University of Tokyo & University of Alberta, Tianyi Zhang Purdue University | ||
10:30 30mPoster | Dependency-Induced Waste in Continuous Integration: An Empirical Study on NPM Dependencies Posters Nimmi Weeraddana University of Waterloo, Mahmoud Alfadel University of Waterloo, Shane McIntosh University of Waterloo | ||
10:30 30mPoster | A Miss Is as Good as A Mile: Metamorphic Testing for Deep Learning Operators Posters Jinyin Chen Zhejiang University of Technology, Chengyu Jia Zhejiang University of Technology, Yunjie Yan Zhejiang University of Technology, Jie Ge Zhejiang University of Technology, haibin zheng Zhejiang University of Technology, Yao Cheng TÜV SÜD Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. | ||
10:30 30mPoster | Investigating Documented Privacy Changes in Android OS Posters Chuan Yan University of Queensland, Mark Huasong Meng National University of Singapore, Fuman Xie University of Queensland, Guangdong Bai University of Queensland | ||
10:30 30mPoster | Analyzing Quantum Programs with LintQ: A Static Analysis Framework for Qiskit Posters | ||
10:30 30mPoster | Generative AI for Pull Request Descriptions: Adoption, Impact, and Developer Interventions Posters Tao Xiao Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Hideaki Hata Shinshu University, Christoph Treude Singapore Management University, Kenichi Matsumoto Nara Institute of Science and Technology | ||
10:30 30mPoster | Bloat beneath Python's Scales: A Fine-Grained Inter-Project Dependency Analysis Posters Georgios-Petros Drosos ETH Zurich, Thodoris Sotiropoulos ETH Zurich, Diomidis Spinellis Athens University of Economics and Business & Delft University of Technology, Dimitris Mitropoulos University of Athens | ||
This room is conjoined with the Foyer to provide additional space for the coffee break, and hold poster presentations throughout the event.