Minimizing Breaking Changes and Redundancy in Mitigating Technical Lag for Java Projects
Rui Lu, Lyuye Zhang, Kaixuan Li, Min Zhang, Yixiang Chen
TL;DR
DepUpdater addresses the problem of outdated OSS dependencies in Maven Java projects by minimizing technical lag through a staged upgrade process that accounts for both direct and transitive dependencies. It builds a rich dependency graph augmented with API reachability via points-to analysis and employs pruning to avoid redundant dependencies, while using static compatibility checks (Revapi) to prevent breaking changes. The method is evaluated against strong baselines, with ablation showing both pruning and compatibility components contribute meaningfully, and a transitive-dependency study revealing that deeper-than-sixth-layer upgrades rarely cause client breakages. Practically, DepUpdater delivers substantial reductions in both time lag and version lag, demonstrates compatibility-preserving upgrades across multi-module projects, and provides actionable insights into transitive upgrades for researchers and practitioners. The work opens doors for integrating similar, automated lag-mitigation strategies into maintenance and development workflows, and it provides open-source tooling and data for reproducibility.
Abstract
Re-using open-source software (OSS) can avoid reinventing the wheel, but failing to keep it up-to-date can lead to missing new features and persistent bugs or vulnerabilities that have already been resolved. The use of outdated OSS libraries introduces technical lag, necessitating timely upgrades. However, maintaining up-to-date libraries is challenging, as it may introduce incompatibility issues that break the project or redundant dependencies that unnecessarily increase the size of the project. These issues discourage developers from upgrading libraries, highlighting the need for a fully automated solution that balances version upgrades, reduces technical lag, ensures compatibility, and avoids redundant dependencies. To this end, we propose DepUpdater, which ensures that upgrades minimize technical lag as much as possible while avoiding incompatibility issues and redundant dependencies. The comparison with existing dependency management tools demonstrates that DepUpdater more effectively reduces technical lag while ensuring compatibility and pruning redundant dependencies. Additionally, an ablation study highlights the potential benefits of considering pruning requirements during upgrades to mitigate incompatibility issues. Finally, leveraging DepUpdater, we investigate the impact of transitive dependency upgrades on client compatibility, providing insights for future research.