Detecting Incompatibilities Concealed in Duplicated Software Libraries

Software libraries are currently a popular means to reuse functionality. While they allow for rapid development of large applications, they also bring new challenges. One of them is the selection and composition of the right set of libraries. If it is not done properly, libraries may be incompatible, duplicated or redundant. In this work, we cope with the problem of duplicate libraries and detect situations when a system contains different versions of the same library, one of which should be removed to retain system consistency. These duplicates are detected using an algorithm based on a graph discovery. While this algorithm is generic, we demonstrate its usage specifically on the Java platform with JAR files and in doing so, we provide an experiment showing the scale of the problem on a set of open-source programs.