Computer Science > Software Engineering
[Submitted on 15 Jun 2022 (v1), last revised 25 May 2023 (this version, v3)]
Title:Automating Dependency Updates in Practice: An Exploratory Study on GitHub Dependabot
View PDFAbstract:Dependency management bots automatically open pull requests to update software dependencies on behalf of developers. Early research shows that developers are suspicious of updates performed by dependency management bots and feel tired of overwhelming notifications from these bots. Despite this, dependency management bots are becoming increasingly popular. Such contrast motivates us to investigate Dependabot, currently the most visible bot on GitHub, to reveal the effectiveness and limitations of state-of-art dependency management bots. We use exploratory data analysis and a developer survey to evaluate the effectiveness of Dependabot in keeping dependencies up-to-date, interacting with developers, reducing update suspicion, and reducing notification fatigue. We obtain mixed findings. On the positive side, projects do reduce technical lag after Dependabot adoption and developers are highly receptive to its pull requests. On the negative side, its compatibility scores are too scarce to be effective in reducing update suspicion; developers tend to configure Dependabot toward reducing the number of notifications; and 11.3% of projects have deprecated Dependabot in favor of other alternatives. The survey confirms our findings and provides insights into the key missing features of Dependabot. Based on our findings, we derive and summarize the key characteristics of an ideal dependency management bot which can be grouped into four dimensions: configurability, autonomy, transparency, and self-adaptability.
Submission history
From: Hao He [view email][v1] Wed, 15 Jun 2022 01:25:46 UTC (2,066 KB)
[v2] Sun, 31 Jul 2022 00:34:07 UTC (3,461 KB)
[v3] Thu, 25 May 2023 13:54:30 UTC (3,553 KB)
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