MSR 2023
Dates to be announced Melbourne, Australia
co-located with ICSE 2023
Mon 15 May 2023 15:45 - 15:57 at Meeting Room 110 - Process Automation & DevOps Chair(s): Andy Meneely

Modern software development practices increasingly rely on third-party libraries due to the inherent benefits of reuse. However, libraries may contain security vulnerabilities that can propagate to the dependent applications. To counter this, maintainers of dependent projects should monitor their dependencies and security reports to ensure that only patched releases of the upstream applications are in use. As manual maintenance of dependencies has shown to be ineffective, several automated tools (aka bots) have been proposed to assist developers in rapidly identifying and resolving vulnerable dependencies. In this work, we focus on Dependabot, a popular bot providing security and version updates, and study developers’ receptivity to its security updates in mature and actively maintained JavaScript projects. Moreover, we carry out a fine-grained analysis of the lifecycle of every vulnerability to manifest how they are dealt with in the presence of Dependabot. Our findings show that the task of fixing vulnerable dependencies is, to a large extent, delegated to Dependabot and that developers merge the majority of security updates within several days. On the other hand, when developers do not merge a security update, they usually address the identified vulnerability manually. This approach, however, often takes up to several months which in turn could expose the projects to security issues.

Mon 15 May

Displayed time zone: Hobart change

15:45 - 16:30
Process Automation & DevOpsData and Tool Showcase Track / Technical Papers / Industry Track at Meeting Room 110
Chair(s): Andy Meneely Rochester Institute of Technology
15:45
12m
Talk
Investigating the Resolution of Vulnerable Dependencies with Dependabot Security UpdatesDistinguished Paper Award
Technical Papers
Hamid Mohayeji Nasrabadi Eindhoven University of Technology, Andrei Agaronian Eindhoven University of Technology, Eleni Constantinou University of Cyprus, Nicola Zanone Eindhoven University of Technology, Alexander Serebrenik Eindhoven University of Technology
15:57
12m
Talk
Unveiling the Relationship Between Continuous Integration and Code Coverage
Technical Papers
José Diego Saraiva da Silva UFRN, Daniel Alencar Da Costa University of Otago, Uirá Kulesza Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Gustavo Sizílio Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, José Gameleira Neto Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Roberta Coelho , Mei Nagappan University of Waterloo
16:09
6m
Talk
EGAD: A Moldable Tool for GitHub Action Analysis
Data and Tool Showcase Track
Pablo Valenzuela-Toledo University of Bern, Alexandre Bergel University of Chile, Timo Kehrer University of Bern, Oscar Nierstrasz University of Bern, Switzerland
DOI Pre-print
16:15
6m
Talk
The Atlassian Data Lake: consolidating enriched software development data in a single, queryable system
Industry Track
Arik Friedman Atlassian, Rohan Dhupelia Atlassian, Ben Jackson Atlassian
File Attached
16:21
6m
Talk
Are We Speeding Up or Slowing Down? On Temporal Aspects of Code Velocity
Technical Papers
Gunnar Kudrjavets University of Groningen, Nachiappan Nagappan Facebook, Ayushi Rastogi University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Pre-print