Recommending third-party library updates with LSTM neural networks

During the lifecycle of a software project, oftentimes developers have the need to update third-party libraries (TPLs) from an old version to a newer one. This aims to keep their code up-to-date with the latest functionalities offered by the libraries. In practice, choosing the next version for a library is a daunting task since it is crucial to maintain a harmonious relationship with other libraries. We propose DeepLib, a novel approach to the recommendation of an upgrade plan for software projects with respect to library usage. We mine migration history to build matrices and train deep neural networks, which are eventually used to forecast the subsequent versions of the related libraries. We evaluate the framework on a dataset from the Maven Central Repository. The results show promising outcomes: DeepLib can recommend the next version for the library of interest, earning a high prediction accuracy.