Selecting Third-Party Libraries: The Practitioners’ Perspective
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.
Wed 11 Nov Times are displayed in time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change
17:00 - 17:30 | |||
17:00 2mTalk | Emerging Perspectives of Application Programming Interface Strategy: A Framework to Respond to Business Concerns Journal First Juho LindmanUniversity of Gothenburg, Jennifer HorkoffChalmers and the University of Gothenburg, Imed HammoudaMediterranean Institute of Technology, Eric KnaussChalmers and University of Gothenburg | ||
17:03 1mTalk | Exempla Gratis (E.G.): Code Examples for Free Industry Papers Celeste BarnabyFacebook, Inc., Koushik SenUniversity of California at Berkeley, Tianyi ZhangHarvard University, USA, Elena GlassmanHarvard University, Satish ChandraFacebook, USA DOI | ||
17:05 1mTalk | Exploring How Deprecated Python Library APIs Are (Not) Handled Research Papers Jiawei WangMonash University, Australia, Li LiMonash University, Australia, Kui LiuNanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China, Haipeng CaiWashington State University, USA DOI | ||
17:07 1mTalk | LibComp: An IntelliJ Plugin for Comparing Java Libraries Tool Demos Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached | ||
17:09 1mTalk | Selecting Third-Party Libraries: The Practitioners’ Perspective Research Papers Enrique Larios VargasSoftware Improvement Group, Netherlands, Maurício AnicheDelft University of Technology, Netherlands, Christoph TreudeUniversity of Adelaide, Australia, Magiel BruntinkSoftware Improvement Group, Netherlands, Georgios GousiosFacebook & Delft University of Technology DOI | ||
17:11 19mTalk | Conversations on APIs Paper Presentations Celeste BarnabyFacebook, Inc., Jiawei WangMonash University, Australia, Juho LindmanUniversity of Gothenburg, Rehab El-HajjUniversity of Alberta, Canada, Tam NguyenAuburn University, USA, M: Massimiliano Di PentaUniversity of Sannio, Italy |