Analyzing Maintenance Activities of Software Libraries

Abstract

Industrial applications heavily integrate open-source software libraries nowadays. Beyond the benefits that libraries bring, they can also impose a real threat in case a library is affected by a vulnerability but its community is not active in creating a fixing release. Therefore, I want to introduce an automatic monitoring approach for industrial applications to identify open-source dependencies that show negative signs regarding their current or future maintenance activities. Since most research in this field is limited due to lack of features, labels, and transitive links, and thus is not applicable in industry, my approach aims to close this gap by capturing the impact of direct and transitive dependencies in terms of their maintenance activities. Automatically monitoring the maintenance activities of dependencies reduces the manual effort of application maintainers and supports application security by continuously having well-maintained dependencies.