Seminar by Dr. Tom Mens & Dr. Eleni Constantinou (University of Mons, Belgium)

Speakers: Dr. Tom Mens & Dr. Eleni Constantinou (University of Mons, Belgium)                                                                                                                     

Title: Socio-technical Software Health: Issues Within and Across Open Source Software Dependency Networks

Date: Friday May 24th, 2019

Time: 10:30am

Room:  EV003.309

ABSTRACT

The large majority of today’s software is relying on open software components. Such components are typically distributed through package managers for a wide variety of programming languages, and developed and maintained through online distributed software development services like GitHub. Software component repositories are perceived as software ecosystems that constitute complex and evolving socio-technical software dependency networks. Because of their complexity and evolution, these ecosystems tend to suffer from a wide variety of software health issues that can be either technical or social in nature. Examples of such issues include the ecosystem fragility due to exponential growth and transitive dependencies; the abundance of outdated, unmaintained or obsolete software components; the prolonged presence of unfixed bugs and security vulnerabilities; the abandonment or high turnover of key contributors, suboptimal collaboration between contributors, and many more.

This presentation will report on our past and ongoing empirical research that studies such health factors within and across different software packaging ecosystems (such as npm, RubyGems, Cargo, CRAN, CPAN). We provide empirical evidence of some of the health problems, compare their presence across different ecosystems, and suggest ways to reduce their potential impact by providing concrete guidelines and tools. The presented research Is being conducted by researchers of the Software Engineering Lab at the University of Mons in the context of two ongoing projects SECOHealth and SECO-ASSIST, aiming to analyse and improve the health of software ecosystems.

BIO

Tom Mens, Full Professor and Director of the Software Engineering Lab of the University of Mons, Belgium.

Eleni Constantinou, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Software Engineering Lab of the University of Mons, Belgium.