“The NPM package repository contains over two million packages and serves tens of billions of downloads per-week. Nearly every single JavaScript application uses the NPM package manager to install packages from the NPM repository. NPM relies on a ‘semantic versioning’ (‘semver’) scheme to maintain a healthy ecosystem, where bug-fixes are reliably delivered to downstream packages as quickly as possible. … In order to understand how developers use semver, we build a dataset containing every version of every package on NPM and analyze the flow of updates throughout the ecosystem.”

Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.