Café SERU No. 7 on third-party library quality

Dr. Bodin Chinthanet, a specially appointed assistant professor in the Software Engineering Laboratory at NAIST, gave Café SERU No. 7 as an online lunchtime talk on 5 April 2022. His talk, “Characterizing the Quality of Third-party libraries through Runnability and Risk Assessment in the Open Source Ecosystem”, had two parts. The first asked how developers choose a good package and found, through a developer survey and an analysis of runnability, that users and contributors judge package quality in similar ways, with runnability as a useful guide. The second looked at security risk and found that the delay in adopting a vulnerability fix depends on factors such as severity and freshness, while most vulnerable code is not reachable from the application.

Dr. Chinthanet later co-authored V-Achilles, a tool by our undergraduate students that visualizes vulnerable npm dependencies, which appeared at ASE 2022.