Designing Abandabot: When Does Open Source Dependency Abandonment Matter?

Published: April 12, 2026

Authors: *Courtney Miller, *Hao He, Weigen Chen, Elizabeth Lin, Chenyang Yang, Bogdan Vasilescu, Christian Kästner
Venue: The 2026 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
Links: [Code]
Notes: *Joint First Authors

Abstract

Despite the inevitable risk that depending on abandoned open source dependencies poses, many developers feel a lack of resources and guidance on how to deal with this. Automated detection of abandonment is feasible, but not all abandoned dependencies impact a downstream project equally. In this paper, we perform a need-finding interview study with 22 open source maintainers to explore what makes the abandonment of certain dependencies impactful to their project, as well as their information needs and design requirements for such an automated notification tool. We find four main factors, the depth of integration, the availability of alternatives, the importance of the functionality, and external environmental pressures. Using this emerging theory, we then build an LLM-based classifier to predict the impact of a dependency’s abandonment in a given context, and evaluate it with an independent user study with 124 open source maintainers. Our results show that the classifier is effective at predicting whether a dependency’s abandonment would be impactful to a project, and that theory-based explanations given by the LLM are useful to developers when making judgments about the potential impactfulness of a given dependency’s abandonment.