Strong Dependencies between Software Components

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of strong dependencies between software components to better model semantic relationships, and explores their implications for quality assurance and upgrade risk assessment through empirical analysis.

Contribution

It proposes the notion of strong dependency as an improvement over syntactic dependency models and derives component sensitivity for practical applications.

Findings

Strong dependencies reveal deeper semantic relationships.

Component sensitivity helps assess upgrade risks.

Empirical analysis on large FOSS system demonstrates practical relevance.

Abstract

Component-based systems often describe context requirements in terms of explicit inter-component dependencies. Studying large instances of such systems?such as free and open source software (FOSS) distributions?in terms of declared dependencies between packages is appealing. It is however also misleading when the language to express dependencies is as expressive as boolean formulae, which is often the case. In such settings, a more appropriate notion of component dependency exists: strong dependency. This paper introduces such notion as a first step towards modeling semantic, rather then syntactic, inter-component relationships. Furthermore, a notion of component sensitivity is derived from strong dependencies, with ap- plications to quality assurance and to the evaluation of upgrade risks. An empirical study of strong dependencies and sensitivity is presented, in the context of one of the largest, freely available, component-based system.