Reasons and drawbacks of using trivial npm packages: the developers' perspective

Abstract

Code reuse is traditionally seen as good practice. Recent trends have pushed the idea of code reuse to an extreme, by using packages that implement simple and trivial tasks, which we call ‘trivial packages’. A recent incident where a trivial package led to the breakdown of some of the most popular web applications such as Facebook and Netflix, put the spotlight on whether using trivial packages should be encouraged. Therefore, in this research, we mine more than 230,000 npm packages and 38,000 JavaScript projects in order to study the prevalence of trivial packages. We found that trivial packages are common, making up 16.8% of the studied npm packages. We performed a survey with 88 Node.js developers who use trivial packages to understand the reasons for and drawbacks of their use. We found that trivial packages are used because they are perceived to be well-implemented and tested pieces of code. However, developers are concerned about maintaining and the risks of breakages due to the extra dependencies trivial packages introduce.