Interactive, effort-aware library version harmonization

As different modules of a project directly depend on multiple versions of the same third-party library, such library version inconsistencies could increase dependency maintenance cost, or even lead to dependency conflicts when modules are inter-dependent. We first conduct a survey with 131 Java developers from GitHub to retrieve first-hand information on library version inconsistencies. Then, based on the insights from our survey, we propose LibHarmo. Our experimental study on 443 highly-starred Java Maven projects shows that i) LibHarmo detected 621 library version inconsistencies in 152 (34.3%) projects with a false positive rate of 16.8%, while Maven's enforcer plugin only detected 219 of them; and ii) LibHarmo saved 87.5% of the harmonization efforts. Further, 31 library version inconsistencies have been confirmed, and 17 of them have been already harmonized by developers.

As different modules of a project directly depend on multiple versions of the same third-party library, such library version inconsistencies could increase dependency maintenance cost, or even lead to dependency conflicts when modules are inter-dependent. We first conduct a survey with 131 Java developers from GitHub to retrieve first-hand information on library version inconsistencies. Then, based on the insights from our survey, we propose LibHarmo. Our experimental study on 443 highly-starred Java Maven projects shows that i) LibHarmo detected 621 library version inconsistencies in 152 (34.3%) projects with a false positive rate of 16.8%, while Maven's enforcer plugin only detected 219 of them; and ii) LibHarmo saved 87.5% of the harmonization efforts. Further, 31 library version inconsistencies have been confirmed, and 17 of them have been already harmonized by developers.