DValidator: An approach for validating dependencies in build configurations

Abstract

Reusing components is a well-established practice in modern software engineering and brings many advantages, such as a reduction of development costs and time. However, there are still several problems when reusing software components, such as the management of the dependencies of a project. Modern build systems provide dependency managers to support developers when dealing with dependencies. But even with this tool support, dependency management is an error-prone task which can lead to dependency hell if it gets out of control.In this paper, we propose DValidator, an approach that considers dependencies on project level and method call level for validating dependencies in build configurations. First, DValidator encodes a project’s dependency graph as specified in a build configuration and its call graph into a representation using Answer Set Programming (ASP). Then it uses Clingo as a solver to detect problems with the dependencies in that build configuration. In a preliminary evaluation with four open source Maven projects we show that our approach can detect selected dependency smells in less than eight seconds. Next steps concern the investigation of our approach for automatically improving dependency configurations, such as automatically repairing dependency smells and conflicts.Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board.