What About Our Bug? A Study on the Responsiveness of NPM Package Maintainers
Mohammadreza Saeidi, Ethan Thoma, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Gema Rodr\'iguez-P\'erez

TL;DR
This study analyzes the responsiveness of npm package maintainers to bug reports, revealing a generally high responsiveness rate and identifying key reasons why some bugs remain unresolved, which can inform better open-source practices.
Contribution
It provides the first large-scale analysis of maintainer responsiveness in npm, including a taxonomy of reasons for unaddressed bugs, combining quantitative and qualitative methods.
Findings
Median project responsiveness is 70%.
Responsiveness varies due to contribution practices and dependency constraints.
A taxonomy of reasons for unresolved bugs is proposed.
Abstract
Background: Widespread use of third-party libraries makes ecosystems like Node Package Manager (npm) critical to modern software development. However, this interconnected chain of dependencies also creates challenges: bugs in one library can propagate downstream, potentially impacting many other libraries that rely on it. We hypothesize that maintainers may not always decide to fix a bug, especially if the maintainer decides it falls out of their responsibility within the chain of dependencies. Aims: To confirm this hypothesis, we investigate the responsiveness of 30,340 bug reports across 500 of the most depended-upon npm packages. Method: We adopt a mixed-method approach to mine repository issue data and perform qualitative open coding to analyze reasons behind unaddressed bug reports. Results: Our findings show that maintainers are generally responsive, with a median project-level…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Software System Performance and Reliability · Open Source Software Innovations
