Abstract Libraries assist in accelerating the development of software applications by providing reusable functionalities. Libraries and applications that declare these libraries as dependencies become their clients. However, as libraries evolve, maintaining the dependencies in client projects can be challenging if the new version contains breaking changes. Yet, limited research focuses on analyzing the impact of breaking changes on client projects when updating dependencies in the wild. Hence, we conduct an empirical analysis using Java projects built using Maven to investigate the impact of breaking changes introduced between two library versions. Our dataset included 18,415 Maven artifacts, declaring 142,355 direct dependencies, out of which 71.60% were not up-to-date. We automatically updated these dependencies and discovered that 11.58% of the dependency updates resulted in breaking changes that affected the client, and almost half of them were introduced during a non-major update. We analyzed the changes in the libraries that contributed towards these breaking changes, and our results indicate that changes in transitive dependencies were a significant factor in introducing breaking changes. We further investigated if it was common for clients to use functionalities of transitive dependencies directly without declaring them. This showed that over half of the clients use transitive functionality. Therefore, we analyzed actions suggested to resolve these breaking changes introduced by transitive dependencies under the discussions on open-source platforms, and the frequently suggested action was to exclude the transitive dependency from the project configuration.

Modern software applications rely heavily on the usage of libraries, which provide reusable functionality, to accelerate the development process. As libraries evolve and release new versions, the software systems that depend on those libraries (the clients) should update their dependencies to use these new versions as the new release could, for example, include critical fixes for security vulnerabilities. However, updating is not always a smooth process, as it can result in software failures in the clients if the new version includes breaking changes. Yet, there is little research on how these breaking changes impact the client projects in the wild. To identify if changes between two library versions cause breaking changes at the client end, we perform an empirical study on Java projects built using Maven. For the analysis, we used 18,415 Maven artifacts, which declared 142,355 direct dependencies, of which 71.60% were not up-to-date. We updated these dependencies and found that 11.58% of the dependency updates contain breaking changes that impact the client. We further analyzed these changes in the library which impact the client projects and examine if libraries have adhered to the semantic versioning scheme when introducing breaking changes in their releases. Our results show that changes in transitive dependencies were a major factor in introducing breaking changes during dependency updates and almost half of the detected client impacting breaking changes violate the semantic versioning scheme by introducing breaking changes in non-Major updates.