Can my Package Survive? Aligning contributions anddependencies for Ecosystem Congruence

Abstract: Adoption of third-party libraries for contemporary software development has led to the creation of large inter-dependency networks, where sustainability issues of a single library can have widespread network effects. Maintainers of these libraries are often overworked, relying on the contributions of volunteers to keep libraries alive. Where do these contributions come from?<br> In this work, we hypothesize that the developers who rely on a library because their code depends on it might also be the ones who contribute to the library to ensure its sustainability, i.e., their contributions and dependencies are aligned in an ecosystem. We leverage socio-technical techniques to measure the degree to which contributions align with dependency changes at the ecosystem level. We conduct a large-scale empirical study to compute our congruence metrics using 1.7 million issues, 970 thousand pull requests (PR), and over 5.3 million commits belonging to 107,242 npm packages. We find that congruence reflects global ecosystem events and has an impact on package survival. By providing quantitative evidence, our work lays the groundwork for future research on how the collective ecosystem can ensure the survival of its packages. Data Description: The source code and datasets for (a) ecosystem-level analysis (\Ecosystem_congruence_analysis(RQ1)), (b) package survival analysis (\Survival_analysis(RQ2)), and (c) file path and source code similarities of developer contributions analysis (Filepath_code_similarity_analysis(RQ3)). For each folder, it includes a text file to describe the file details.