More Effective JavaScript Breaking Change Detection via Dynamic Object Relation Graph
Dezhen Kong, Jiakun Liu, Chao Ni, David Lo, Lingfeng Bao · Proceedings of the ACM on software engineering. · 2025
JavaScript libraries are characterized by their widespread use, frequent code changes, and a high tolerance for backward-incompatible changes. Awareness of such breaking changes can help developers adapt to version updates and avoid negative impacts. Several tools have been targeted to or can be used to detect breaking change detection in the JavaScript community. However, these tools detect breaking changes in different ways, and there are currently no systematic reviews of these approaches. From a preliminary study on popular JavaScript libraries, we find that existing approaches, including simple regression testing, model-based testing, and type differencing, cannot detect many breaking changes but can produce plenty of false positives. We discuss the reasons for missing breaking changes and producing false positives. Based on the insights from our findings, we propose a new approach named Diagnose that iteratively constructs an object relation graph based on API exploration and forced execution-based type analysis. Diagnose then refine the graphs and reconstruct the graphs in the newer versions of the libraries to detect breaking changes. By evaluating the approach on the same set of libraries used in the preliminary study, we find that Diagnose can detect many more breaking changes (60.2%) and produce fewer false positives. Therefore, Diagnose is suitable for practical use.