Extracting Insights from the Topology of the JavaScript Package Ecosystem

Abstract

Software ecosystems have had a tremendous impact on computing and society, capturing the attention of businesses, researchers, and policy makers alike. Massive ecosystems like the JavaScript node package manager (npm) is evidence of how packages are readily available for use by software projects. Due to its high-dimension and complex properties, software ecosystem analysis has been limited. In this paper, we leverage topological methods in visualize the high-dimensional datasets from a software ecosystem. Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is an emerging technique to analyze high-dimensional datasets, which enables us to study the shape of data. We generate the npm software ecosystem topology to uncover insights and extract patterns of existing libraries by studying its localities. Our realworld example reveals many interesting insights and patterns that describes the shape of a software ecosystem.

A topological analysis of communication channels for knowledge sharing in contemporary GitHub projects

“…As such, we use the largest sample of 10,000 points to ensure confidence in our result. As shown by Lertwittayatrai et al [14], the result tends to stabilize as more points are added.…”

“…In software engineering, TDA was also applied in a study of software testing by Costa et al [23]. Similar to Lertwittayatrai et al [14], a topology of the dataset is generated to provide a visual interpretation of multi-dimensions data analysis. Figure 1 provides an example of how a TDA is constructed.…”

“…One reason could be that the license information is embedded in other locations, such as a webpage. For example, the python library scikit-learn has its license information on the python ecosystem website 14 .…”

“…This practice may also be community driven. For example, according to Lertwittayatrai et al [14], npm projects tend to use the MIT license in their projects.…”

“…In the software engineering context, the TDA topology has also been applied in such studies. Lertwittayatrai et al [14] use topological methods to visualize the high-dimensional datasets from a software ecosystem. In the study, the TDA allows the analysis of relationships between six related dataset features of a package, that is, author, author domain, license, tagged keywords, version released, and number of dependencies.…”