Towards Compatibly Mitigating Technical Lag in Maven Projects
Rui Lu
TL;DR
LagEase addresses the problem of technical lag in Maven dependency management by mitigating lag without causing compatibility issues or dependency bloating. It combines restoring a complete dependency graph, topological-like traversal, and compatibility/debloating filtering using program analysis tools to propose safe updates. The approach yields empirical improvements over Dependabot, reducing technical lag and breakage in a 5-repository evaluation. The work suggests that principled, code-centric dependency upgrades can generalize beyond Maven to other ecosystems like npm.
Abstract
Library reuse is a widely adopted practice in software development, however, re-used libraries are not always up-to-date, thus including unnecessary bugs or vulnerabilities. Brutely upgrading libraries to the latest versions is not feasible because breaking changes and bloated dependencies could be introduced, which may break the software project or introduce maintenance efforts. Therefore, balancing the technical lag reduction and the prevention of newly introduced issues are critical for dependency management. To this end, LagEase is introduced as a novel tool designed to address the challenges of mitigating the technical lags and avoid incompatibility risks and bloated dependencies. Experimental results show that LagEase outperforms Dependabot, providing a more effective solution for managing Maven dependencies.