Mining Library Migration Graphs

Software systems intensively depend on external libraries, chosen at conception time. However, relevance of any library irremediably changes during projects and/or library life cycle. As a consequence, projects developers must periodically reconsider the libraries they depend on, and must think about library migration. When they want to migrate their libraries, they then have to identify candidate libraries that offer similar facilities and thus can substitute to each other. They also have to compare candidates to choose the one that best fits their needs. Finding a relevant library replacement is a well known tedious and time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose an approach that identifies sets of similar libraries and that produces what we call library migration graphs that show how existing projects have performed migrations among them. These graphs, constructed from the observation of a large number of software projects, ease the discovery and selection of library replacements.