Modern software applications use existing software components to fast forward the development process, resulting in software dependencies. These components will evolve for various reasons and could also be updated to address critical issues existing in the component, like vulnerabilities that could impact the software that depend on them. Therefore, an application’s dependencies should be updated to their latest version to avoid these issues. However, changes in a software component can cause critical failures in the dependent software if the new version includes incompatibilities compared to its previous version. These incompatibilities between two library versions are known as breaking changes. Each software system that depends on the component will need to update its code to accommodate these breaking changes, making it difficult to automate the update process.
This research analyzes a set of dependency updates and code changes made in response to fixing breaking changes in Java projects. The breaking changes will be used to create a comprehensive taxonomy of the types of breaking changes that occur in Java projects. The data gathered on the dependency updates will be analyzed to identify patterns that can be applied across different projects to automate the dependency update process.