Identify Impacts of Evolving Third Party Components on Long-Living Software Systems

Integrating 3rd party components in software systems provides promising advantages but also risks due to disconnected evolution cycles. Deciding whether to migrate to a newer version of a 3rd party component integrated into self-implemented code or to switch to a different one is challenging. Dedicated evolution support for 3rd party component scenarios is hence required. Existing approaches do not account for open source components which allow accessing and analyzing their source code and project information. The approach presented in this paper combines analyses for code dependency, code quality, and bug tracker information for a holistic view on the evolution with 3rd party components. We applied the approach in a case study on a communication middleware component for industrial devices used at ABB. We identified 7 methods potentially impacted by changes of 3rd party components despite the absence of interface changes. We further identified self-implemented code that does not need any manual investigation after the 3rd party component evolution as well as a positive trend of code and bug tracker issues.