Minimizing Breaking Changes and Redundancy in Mitigating Technical Lag for Java Projects

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 The use of outdated OSS libraries introduces technical lag, necessitating timely upgrades.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.