Contrasting Third-Party Package Management User Experience

Islam, Syful; Kula, Raula Gaikovina; Chinthanet, Bodin; Ishio, Takashi; Matsumoto, Kenichi

doi:10.1109/icsme52107.2021.00077

Cited by 9 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As a whole, tweets belonging to the package management category, including topics such as usage scenarios, configurations, feature information, bug reports, software comparisons, and dependencies, were most prevalent (i.e., 58%). This finding is consistent with our previous studies on software ecosystem issues 13,14 . The findings indicate that developers are using Twitter to filter and curate information about package management activities associated with the npm ecosystem.…”

Section: Topic Of Tweet (Rq 1 ): What Are the Main Topics Of Interest...supporting

confidence: 94%

“…These prior studies show that Twitter posts are useful to understand software developers' challenges. In our previous empirical studies, we looked at the software packaging ecosystem-related discussions by developers on question-and-answering sites and found that package management issues are the biggest challenge [13][14][15] . However, no study has been conducted so far to examine the tweets shared by developers to reveal the challenges associated with using the software packaging ecosystem and how they differ from question-and-answer sites.…”

Section: Studies On Communication Channelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms among developers to stay informed about fast-paced developments in the development landscape, to learn from others, and to build relationships 11,12 . In a series of empirical studies, we looked at the software packaging ecosystemrelated discussions by developers on question-and-answering sites and found that package management issues are the biggest challenge [13][14][15] . However, no study has been conducted that examines the tweets shared by developers to determine the challenges that developers face, including the topic of discussion, nature and sentiments associated with using software packaging ecosystems, as well as how they differ from question-and-answer sites.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

An Empirical Study of npm Ecosystem Related Tweets by Core Software Developers: A Case Study

Islam

Nugroho

Shahrear

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

npm ecosystem is crucial for the JavaScript community and its development is significantly influenced by the opinions and feedback of core software developers.Many software developers have utilized social media, such as Twitter, to share community-related information and their views. However, the communication between npm developers via Twitter in terms of topics, nature, and sentiment have not been analyzed.This study conducts an empirical analysis of tweets by core software developers related to the npm ecosystem to understand their perceptions and opinions better. A dataset of tweets was collected and analyzed using qualitative analysis techniques to identify the topic of tweets, their nature and their sentiments. Our study demonstrated that most tweets belong to the package management category followed by notifications and community-related information.The most frequently discussed topics among core software developers in the package management category are usage scenarios. It appears that developers use a variety of approaches, with information tweets dominating, followed by questions and answers.Additionally, the sentiment analysis revealed that developers express more positive sentiments towards notification and community-related discussion while expressing more neutral opinions towards the package ecosystem discussion category. This case study provides valuable insights into the perceptions and opinions of core software developers regarding the npm ecosystem and can inform future development and decision-making.

show abstract

Section: Topic Of Tweet (Rq 1 ): What Are the Main Topics Of Interest...supporting

confidence: 94%

Section: Studies On Communication Channelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

An Empirical Study of npm Ecosystem Related Tweets by Core Software Developers: A Case Study

Islam

Nugroho

Shahrear

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Recent studies have mainly investigated dependency management and migration [4]- [8]. In our study [9], we explored thirteen PMs to understand whether their package management features correlate with the experience of their end-users. While our recent study indicates that package management features of PM are related to end-user experiences, it is unclear what those issues are and what information is required to resolve them.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Study of Package Management Issues via Stack Overflow

Islam

Kula

Chinthanet

et al. 2023

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The package manager (PM) is crucial to most technology stacks, acting as a broker to ensure that a verified dependency package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to dozens of PMs with various features. While our recent study indicates that package management features of PM are related to end-user experiences, it is unclear what those issues are and what information is required to resolve them. In this paper, we have investigated PM issues faced by end-users through an empirical study of content on Stack Overflow (SO). We carried out a qualitative analysis of 1,131 questions and their accepted answer posts for three popular PMs (i.e., Maven, npm, and NuGet ) to identify issue types, underlying causes, and their resolutions. Our results confirm that end-users struggle with PM tool usage (approximately 64-72%). We observe that most issues are raised by end-users due to lack of instructions and errors messages from PM tools. In terms of issue resolution, we find that external link sharing is the most common practice to resolve PM issues. Additionally, we observe that links pointing to useful resources (i.e., official documentation websites, tutorials, etc.) are most frequently shared, indicating the potential for tool support and the ability to provide relevant information for PM end-users.

show abstract

“…Another case is when a developer is forced to switch programming languages. With an increase of the diversity in technology stacks and third-party library usage [3], developers eventually will face the need to switch a programming language and their subsequent libraries specific to that language [4,5,6]. In this case, developers would have to search for a replacement library that they are familiar with.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intertwining Ecosystems: A Large Scale Empirical Study of Libraries that Cross Software Ecosystems

Kannee¹,

Supatsara²,

Rojpaisarnkit³

et al. 2022

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

An increase in diverse technology stacks and third-party library usage has led developers to inevitably switch technologies. To assist these developers, maintainers have started to release their libraries to multiple technologies, i.e., a cross-ecosystem library. Our goal is to explore the extent to which these crossecosystem libraries are intertwined between ecosystems. We perform a largescale empirical study of 1.1 million libraries from five different software ecosystems, i.e., PyPI for Python, CRAN for R, Maven for Java, RubyGems for Ruby, and NPM for JavaScript to identify 4,146 GitHub projects that release libraries to these five ecosystems. Analyzing their contributions, we first find that a significant majority (median of 37.5%) of contributors of these cross-ecosystem libraries come from a single ecosystem, while also receiving a significant portion of contributions (median of 24.06%) from outside their target ecosystems. We also find that a cross-ecosystem library is written using multiple programming languages. Specifically, three (i.e., PyPI, CRAN, RubyGems) out of the five ecosystems has the majority of source code is written using languages not specific to that ecosystem. As ecosystems become intertwined, this opens up new avenues for research, such as whether or not cross-ecosystem libraries will solve the search for replacement libraries, or how these libraries fit within each ecosystem just to name a few.

show abstract

Contrasting Third-Party Package Management User Experience

Cited by 9 publications

References 10 publications

An Empirical Study of npm Ecosystem Related Tweets by Core Software Developers: A Case Study

An Empirical Study of npm Ecosystem Related Tweets by Core Software Developers: A Case Study

An Empirical Study of Package Management Issues via Stack Overflow

Intertwining Ecosystems: A Large Scale Empirical Study of Libraries that Cross Software Ecosystems

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About