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Wed 11 Nov 2020 17:09 - 17:10 at Virtual room 1 - APIs

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

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17:00 - 17:30
17:00
2m
Talk
Emerging Perspectives of Application Programming Interface Strategy: A Framework to Respond to Business Concerns
Journal First
Juho Lindman University of Gothenburg, Jennifer Horkoff Chalmers and the University of Gothenburg, Imed Hammouda Mediterranean Institute of Technology, Eric Knauss Chalmers and University of Gothenburg
17:03
1m
Talk
Exempla Gratis (E.G.): Code Examples for Free
Industry Papers
Celeste Barnaby Facebook, Inc., Koushik Sen University of California at Berkeley, Tianyi Zhang Harvard University, USA, Elena Glassman Harvard University, Satish Chandra Facebook, USA
DOI
17:05
1m
Talk
Exploring How Deprecated Python Library APIs Are (Not) Handled
Research Papers
Jiawei Wang Monash University, Australia, Li Li Monash University, Australia, Kui Liu Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China, Haipeng Cai Washington State University, USA
DOI
17:07
1m
Talk
LibComp: An IntelliJ Plugin for Comparing Java Libraries
Tool Demos
Rehab El-Hajj University of Alberta, Canada, Sarah Nadi University of Alberta
Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached
17:09
1m
Talk
Selecting Third-Party Libraries: The Practitioners’ Perspective
Research Papers
Enrique Larios Vargas Software Improvement Group, Netherlands, Maurício Aniche Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, Christoph Treude University of Adelaide, Australia, Magiel Bruntink Software Improvement Group, Netherlands, Georgios Gousios Facebook & Delft University of Technology
DOI
17:11
19m
Talk
Conversations on APIs
Paper Presentations
Celeste Barnaby Facebook, Inc., Jiawei Wang Monash University, Australia, Juho Lindman University of Gothenburg, Rehab El-Hajj University of Alberta, Canada, Tam Nguyen Auburn University, USA, M: Massimiliano Di Penta University of Sannio, Italy