We study the evolution and impact of bloated dependencies in a single software ecosystem: Java/Maven. Bloated dependencies are third-party libraries that are packaged in the application binary but are not needed to run the application. We analyze the history of 435 Java projects. This historical data includes 48,469 distinct dependencies, which we study across a total of 31,515 versions of Maven dependency trees. Bloated dependencies steadily increase over time, and 89.2% of the direct dependencies that are bloated remain bloated in all subsequent versions of the studied projects. This empirical evidence suggests that developers can safely remove a bloated dependency. We further report novel insights regarding the unnecessary maintenance efforts induced by bloat. We find that 22% of dependency updates performed by developers are made on bloated dependencies, and that Dependabot suggests a similar ratio of updates on bloated dependencies.
Tue 15 NovDisplayed time zone: Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi change
14:00 - 15:30 | ESEC/FSE 21 - DependabilityESEC/FSE 2021 at SRC LT 53 Chair(s): Domenico Bianculli University of Luxembourg | ||
14:00 15mTalk | ÐArcher: Detecting On-Chain-Off-Chain Synchronization Bugs in Decentralized Applications ESEC/FSE 2021 Wuqi Zhang The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Lili Wei McGill University, Shuqing Li The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Yepang Liu Southern University of Science and Technology, Shing-Chi Cheung Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
14:15 15mTalk | Hazard Analysis for Human-on-the-Loop Interactions in sUAS Systems ESEC/FSE 2021 Michael Vierhauser Johannes Kepler University Linz, Md Nafee Al Islam , Ankit Agrawal University of Notre Dame, Jane Cleland-Huang University of Notre Dame, James Mason Northrop Grumman | ||
14:30 15mTalk | Code Integrity Attestation for PLCs using Black Box Neural Network Predictions ESEC/FSE 2021 Yuqi Chen Singapore Management University, Chris Poskitt Singapore Management University, Jun Sun Singapore Management University DOI Pre-print | ||
14:45 15mTalk | Lightweight and Modular Resource Leak Verification ESEC/FSE 2021 Martin Kellogg University of Washington, Narges Shadab University of California at Riverside, Manu Sridharan University of California at Riverside, Michael D. Ernst University of Washington | ||
15:00 15mTalk | A Longitudinal Analysis of Bloated Java Dependencies ESEC/FSE 2021 Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached | ||