Hi all, I would like to invite you to attend Hemayet Ahmed Chowdhury's MS Thesis Defense. Details are shown below. *Title:* An Empirical Study of API Breaking Changes in BioconductorAn Empirical Study of API Breaking Changes in Bioconductor *Date:* Wednesday, November 30 *Time:* 3:00-4:00pm *Zoom:* https://virginiatech.zoom.us/j/87217273238?pwd=OGVNMFVkeHRhY05pYnNTMnZBM1lyZ... *Committee members:* Na Meng (Chair), Song Li, Muhammad Ali Gulzar Abstract: Bioconductor is the second largest R software package repository that is primarily used for the analysis of genomic and biological data. With downloads exceeding millions in recent years, the widespread growth of the repository's adoption can be attributed to its diverse selection of community-created packages, written in the programming language R, that allow statistical methodologies for analysis and modelling of data. However, as these packages evolve, their APIs go through changes that can break existing user code. Fixing these API breaking changes whenever a package is updated can be frustrating and time consuming, especially since a large fraction of the user community are researchers who do not necessarily have software engineering background. In that context, we first present a tool that can detect syntactic API breaking changes between two release versions of a library written in R through static analysis of the package source code. This tool can be of utility to R package developers, so that they can more comprehensively report or handle the breaking changes in their releases, and to R package users, who want to be aware of the API differences that may exist between two releases before upgrading the libraries in their code. Through the use of this tool and manual inspection, we also conduct an empirical study of the breaking changes and backward incompatibility in Bioconductor packages. We study the 100 most downloaded packages in the repository and find that 28\% of all packages released are backward incompatible. We also find that 55\% of these breaking changes go undocumented and developers don't maintain semantic versioning for 22\% of the releases. Finally, we manually inspect 10 library releases that consisted of breaking changes and discuss the findings from 31 client projects affected by them. Cheers, Na -- *Na Meng, Associate Professor* Virginia Tech | Computer Science (0902) Knowledge Works II, Suite 2226 2202 Kraft Drive, Blacksburg, VA 24060 (540) 231-5492 | nm8247@vt.edu