As with many others here no doubt, I spent a lot of time in 2020 viewing diffs between library versions, reading changelogs, and tracking upstream bugs/features

As with many others here no doubt, I spent a lot of time in 2020 viewing diffs between library versions, reading changelogs, and tracking upstream bugs/features. Although I'll try to resist going on too much of a pro-FOSS rant, the change audit process is much easier for open source projects since you can read not just the changelog entries, but also the corresponding code to verify the claims. That helps with various things including developer trust - it helps you determine whether a project and authors use test coverage to reproduce bugs and prove their fixes, whether performance improvements are measurable, whether there are risky side-effects to look out for, and so on. Increasingly I think that these kinds of 'software due diligence' should become part of recommended software engineering workflows, and that makes me wonder whether some of the repetitive aspects can be automated. A genuinely user-focused, trustworthy app ecosystem would, I think, allow some of these 'change audit' processes to be visible to users so that they can make informed upgrade decisions, and to create a marketplace incentive for upgrades to be reliable.