Why do developers use trivial packages? an empirical case study on npm

Abstract

Code reuse is traditionally seen as good practice. Recent trends have pushed the concept 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 made it imperative to question the growing use of trivial packages.