HFRI III (PhD Scholarship) — Data Analysis Applications in Software Engineering
Description
The project aims to improve the robustness of software packages by reforming unstable packages identified through the analysis of ecosystem-wide fine-grained dependency networks. Objectives include the intrinsic improvement of the robustness of software packages, the assistance of package managers (e.g., Maven, PyPI) in maintaining, improving, and extending their packages in a robust manner through change impact estimation (without, e.g., breaking downstream applications due to changes in their own methods and interfaces), and the indirect assistance of developers in including more stable packages in their projects. Existing work is limited to the construction and analysis of fine-grained package dependency networks, without systematically resolving any identified unstable packages, leaving the required action to the developers’ and package managers’ discretion. Therefore, the proposed research extends and advances existing work by practically resolving unstable packages resulting from the analysis of fine-grained dependency networks through their systematic reformation.