skip to main content
10.1145/2797433.2797475acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesecsawConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Challenges in Software Ecosystems Research

Published: 07 September 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The paper is a meta-analysis of the research field of software ecosystems, by method of surveying 26 authors in the field. It presents a relevant list of literature and six themes in which challenges for software ecosystems can be grouped: Architecture and Design, Governance, Dynamics and Evolution, Data Analytics, Domain-Specific Ecosystems Solutions, and Ecosystems Analysis. As such, it provides a roadmap for future research in the field.

References

[1]
A. Aryani, F. Perin, M. Lungu, A. N. Mahmood, and O. Nierstrasz. Predicting dependences using domain-based coupling. J. Software Evolution and Process, 26(1):50--76, 2014.
[2]
A. Baars and S. Jansen. A framework for software ecosystem governance. In Software Business, volume 114 of Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, pages 168--180. Springer, 2012.
[3]
O. Barbosa and C. Alves. A systematic mapping study on software ecosystems. In Int'l Workshop on Software Ecosystems (IWSECO), pages 15--26. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2011.
[4]
G. Bavota, G. Canfora, M. Di Penta, R. Oliveto, and S. Panichella. The evolution of project inter-dependencies in a software ecosystem: the case of Apache. In Int'l Conf. Software Maintenance, 2013.
[5]
B. Bazelli, A. Hindle, and E. Stroulia. On the personality traits of StackOverflow users. In Int'l Conf. Software Maintenance. IEEE, 2013.
[6]
A. Begel, K. Y. Phang, and T. Zimmermann. Codebook: Discovering and exploiting relationships in software repositories. In Int'l Conf. Software Engineering, pages 125--134, 2010.
[7]
A. Bessi, A. Scala, L. Rossi, Q. Zhang, and W. Quattrociocchi. The economy of attention in the age of (mis)information. Journal of Trust Management, 1(1):12, 2014.
[8]
C. Bird, P. C. Rigby, E. T. Barr, D. J. Hamilton, D. M. Germán, and P. T. Devanbu. The promises and perils of mining Git. In Working Conf. Mining Software Repositories (MSR), pages 1--10, 2009.
[9]
S. A. Bohner and R. S. Arnold. Software Change Impact Analysis. IEEE Computer Society, 1996.
[10]
J. Bosch. From software product lines to software ecosystems. In Int. Software Product Line Conf., pages 111--119, 2009.
[11]
J. Bosch. Architecture challenges for software ecosystems. In European Conf. Software Architecture, pages 93--95. ACM, 2010.
[12]
J. Bosch and P. Bosch-Sijtsema. From integration to composition: on the impact of software product lines, global development and ecosystems. In Int'l Conf. Software Product Lines. Springer, 2009.
[13]
J. Businge, A. Serebrenik, and M. G. J. van den Brand. Survival of Eclipse third-party plug-ins. In Int'l Conf. Software Maintenance, pages 368--377, 2012.
[14]
J. Businge, A. Serebrenik, and M. G. J. van den Brand. Analyzing the Eclipse API usage: Putting the developer in the loop. In European Conf. Software Maintenance and Reengineering, pages 37--46. IEEE Computer Society, 2013.
[15]
M. Caneill and S. Zacchiroli. Debsources: Live and historical views on macro-level software evolution. In Int'l Symp. Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, pages 1--10. ACM, 2014.
[16]
M. Cataldo and J. D. Herbsleb. Architecting in software ecosystems: Interface translucence as an enabler for scalable collaboration. In European Conf. Software Architecture, pages 65--72. ACM, 2010.
[17]
M. Claes, T. Mens, R. Di Cosmo, and J. Vouillon. A historical analysis of Debian package incompatibilities. In Working Conf. Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2015.
[18]
M. Claes, T. Mens, and P. Grosjean. On the maintainability of CRAN packages. In Int'l Conf. on Software Maintenance, Reengineering, and Reverse Engineering (CSMR-WCRE), pages 308--312, 2014.
[19]
E. de Almeida, A. Alvaro, V. Garcia, L. Nascimento, S. Meira, and D. Lucredio. Designing domain-specific software architecture (DSSA): Towards a new approach. In Working Conf. Software Architecture, page 30, Jan 2007.
[20]
Y. Demchenko, P. Grosso, C. De Laat, and P. Membrey. Addressing big data issues in scientific data infrastructure. In Collaboration Technologies and Systems, pages 48--55, May 2013.
[21]
D. Dreyfus and B. Iyer. Managing architectural emergence: A conceptual model and simulation. Decision Support Systems, 46(1):115--127, 2008.
[22]
S. Ducasse, M. Lanza, and S. Tichelaar. Moose: an extensible language-independent environment for reengineering object-oriented systems. In Int'l Symp. Constructing Software Engineering Tools (CoSET), June 2000.
[23]
J. Duenas, H. Parada G., F. Cuadrado, M. Santillan, and J. Ruiz. Apache and Eclipse: Comparing open source project incubators. IEEE Software, 24(6):90--98, 2007.
[24]
N. Economides and E. Katsamakas. Linux vs. Windows: A comparison of application and platform innovation incentives for open source and proprietary software platforms. Working Papers 05--07, NET Institute, 2005.
[25]
U. Eklund and J. Bosch. Architecture for embedded open software ecosystems. J. Systems and Software, 92(0):128--142, 2014.
[26]
T. Fritz, A. Begel, S. C. Müller, S. Yigit-Elliott, and M. Züger. Using psycho-physiological measures to assess task difficulty in software development. In Int'l Conf. Software Engineering, pages 402--413, 2014.
[27]
D. M. Germán, B. Adams, and A. E. Hassan. The evolution of the R software ecosystem. In European Conf. Software Maintenance and Reengineering, pages 243--252, 2013.
[28]
J. M. Gonzalez-Barahona, G. Robles, M. Michlmayr, J. J. Amor, and D. M. German. Macro-level software evolution: a case study of a large software compilation. Empirical Software Engineering, 14(3):262--285, Mar. 2009.
[29]
M. Harman, Y. Jia, and Y. Zhang. App store mining and analysis: MSR for app stores. In Working Conf. Mining Software Repositories (MSR), pages 108--111, June 2012.
[30]
D. Hilkert, C. M. Wolf, A. Benlian, and T. Hess. The as-a-service paradigm and its implications for the software industry: Insights from a comparative case study in CRM software ecosystems. In Software Business, volume 51 of Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, pages 125--137. Springer, 2010.
[31]
B. A. Huberman and T. Hogg. The emergence of computational ecologies. In Lectures in Complex Systems, pages 185--205. Addison-Wesley, 1993.
[32]
S. Hyrynsalmi, T. Mäkilä, A. Järvi, A. Suominen, M. Seppänen, and T. Knuutila. App Store, Marketplace, Play! An analysis of multi-homing in mobile software ecosystems. In Int'l Workshop on Software Ecosystems (IWSECO), volume 879 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pages 59--72, 2012.
[33]
A. Israeli and D. G. Feitelson. The Linux kernel as a case study in software evolution. J. Systems and Software, 83(3):485--501, 2010.
[34]
S. Jansen, A. Finkelstein, and S. Brinkkemper. A sense of community: A research agenda for software ecosystems. In Int'l Conf. Software Engineering, pages 187--190, May 2009.
[35]
H. Kaindl. Difficulties in the transition from OO analysis to design. IEEE Softw., 16(5):94--102, Sept. 1999.
[36]
F. Khomh, T. Dhaliwal, Y. Zou, and B. Adams. Do faster releases improve software quality? An empirical case study of Mozilla Firefox. In Working Conf. Mining Software Repositories (MSR), pages 179--188. IEEE, 2012.
[37]
E. Kouters, B. Vasilescu, A. Serebrenik, and M. G. J. van den Brand. Who's who in Gnome: using LSA to merge software repository identities. In Int'l Conf. Software Maintenance, pages 592--595. IEEE, 2012.
[38]
B. H. Krogh. From analysis to design. In Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems, volume 4763 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 4--4. Springer, 2007.
[39]
M. Lungu. Towards reverse engineering software ecosystems. In Int'l Conf. Software Maintenance, pages 428--431, 2008.
[40]
M. Lungu and M. Lanza. The small project observatory: a tool for reverse engineering software ecosystems. In Int'l Conf. Software Engineering, pages 289--292, 2010.
[41]
J. I. Maletic and A. Marcus. Data cleansing: Beyond integrity analysis. In B. D. Klein and D. F. Rossin, editors, Fifth Conference on Information Quality (IQ 2000), pages 200--209. MIT, 2000.
[42]
K. Manikas and K. M. Hansen. Software ecosystems---A systematic literature review. J. Systems and Software, 86(5):1294--1306, 2013.
[43]
T. Mens, J. Fernández-Ramil, and S. Degrandsart. The evolution of Eclipse. In Int'l Conf. Software Maintenance, pages 386--395, 2008.
[44]
T. Mens and M. Goeminne. Analysing the evolution of social aspects of open source software ecosystems. In Int'l Workshop on Software Ecosystems (IWSECO), pages 1--14. CEUR Workshop Proccedings, June 2011.
[45]
T. Mens, A. Serebrenik, and A. Cleve. Evolving Software Systems. Springer, 2014.
[46]
D. Messerschmitt and C. Szyperski. Software ecosystem: Understanding and indispensable technology and industry. MIT Press, 2003.
[47]
I. Mistrîk, J. Grundy, A. Hoek, and J. Whitehead. Collaborative software engineering: Challenges and prospects. In Collaborative Software Engineering, pages 389--403. Springer, 2010.
[48]
E. Mitleton-Kelly. Ten Principles of Complexity and Enabling Infrastructures, pages 23--50. Pergamon, 2003.
[49]
A. Mockus, R. Fielding, and J. Herbsleb. Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla. ACM Trans. Software Engineering and Methodology, 11(3):309--346, 2002.
[50]
K. Mordal, N. Anquetil, J. Laval, A. Serebrenik, B. Vasilescu, and S. Ducasse. Software quality metrics aggregation in industry. J. Software Evolution and Process, 25(10):1117--1135, 2013.
[51]
O. Nierstrasz and M. Lungu. Agile software assessment (invited paper). In Int'l Conf. Program Comprehension, pages 3--10, 2012.
[52]
F. S. Parreiras, G. Gröner, D. Schwabe, and F. de Freitas Silva. Towards a marketplace of open source software data. In Hawaii Int'l Conf. System Sciences (HICSS), pages 3651--3660. IEEE, 2015.
[53]
F. Pérez, B. E. Granger, and J. D. Hunter. Python: An ecosystem for scientific computing. Computing in Science & Engineering, 13(2):13--21, 2011.
[54]
J. Pérez, R. Deshayes, M. Goeminne, and T. Mens. SECONDA: software ecosystem analysis dashboard. In CSMR, pages 527--530, 2012.
[55]
E. S. Raymond. The cathedral and the bazaar: musings on Linux and open source by an accidental revolutionary. O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 2001.
[56]
R. Robbes, M. Lungu, and D. Röthlisberger. How do developers react to API deprecation? the case of a Smalltalk ecosystem. In Int'l Symp. Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 56:1--56:11. ACM, 2012.
[57]
G. Robles. Replicating MSR: A study of the potential replicability of papers published in the mining software repositories proceedings. In Working Conf. Mining Software Repositories (MSR), pages 171--180. IEEE, 2010.
[58]
G. Robles, L. Arjona Reina, A. Serebrenik, B. Vasilescu, and J. M. González-Barahona. FLOSS 2013: a survey dataset about free software contributors: challenges for curating, sharing, and combining. In Working Conf. Mining Software Repositories (MSR), pages 396--399. ACM, 2014.
[59]
G. Robles, J. Gonzalez-Barahona, D. Izquierdo-Cortazar, and I. Herraiz. Tools for the study of the usual data sources found in libre software projects. Int'l Journal of Open Source Software and Processes, 1(1):24--45, 2009.
[60]
I. Samoladas, L. Angelis, and I. Stamelos. Survival analysis on the duration of open source projects. Information & Software Technology, 52(9):902--922, 2010.
[61]
F. Shull, J. C. Carver, S. Vegas, and N. J. Juzgado. The role of replications in empirical software engineering. Int'l Conf. Empirical Software Engineering, 13(2):211--218, 2008.
[62]
D. Socha and J. D. Tenenberg. Sketching software in the wild. In Int'l Conf. Software Engineering, pages 1237--1240, 2013.
[63]
G. Timbrell and G. Gable. The SAP ecosystem: A knowledge perspective. In F. F.-H. Nah, editor, Enterprise Resource Planning: Solutions and Management, pages 209--220. IGI Global, 2002.
[64]
J. van Angeren, V. Blijleven, and S. Jansen. Relationship intimacy in software ecosystems: a survey of the dutch software industry. In Int'l Conf. Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems (MEDES), pages 68--75, 2011.
[65]
A. van Deursen, P. Klint, and J. Visser. Domain-specific languages: An annotated bibliography. SIGPLAN Not., 35(6):26--36, June 2000.
[66]
B. Vasilescu, A. Capiluppi, and A. Serebrenik. Gender, representation and online participation: A quantitative study of StackOverflow. In SocialInformatics, pages 332--338, 2012.
[67]
B. Vasilescu, A. Capiluppi, and A. Serebrenik. Gender, representation and online participation: A quantitative study. Interacting with Computers, 26(5):488--511, 2014.
[68]
B. Vasilescu, D. Posnett, B. Ray, M. G. J. van den Brand, A. Serebrenik, P. T. Devanbu, and V. Filkov. Gender and tenure diversity in GitHub teams. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), pages 3789--3798. ACM, 2015.
[69]
B. Vasilescu, A. Serebrenik, P. T. Devanbu, and V. Filkov. How social Q&A sites are changing knowledge sharing in open source software communities. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), pages 342--354, 2014.
[70]
B. Vasilescu, A. Serebrenik, M. Goeminne, and T. Mens. On the variation and specialisation of workload: A case study of the GNOME ecosystem community. J. Empirical Software Engineering, 19(4):955--1008, 2014.
[71]
M. Viljainen and M. Kauppinen. Software ecosystems: A set of management practices for platform integrators in the telecom industry. In Software Business, volume 80 of Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, pages 32--43. Springer, 2011.
[72]
R. Wettel and M. Lanza. CodeCity: 3D visualization of large-scale software. In Int'l Conf. Software Engineering, pages 921--922, 2008.
[73]
Q. Xuan, M. Gharehyazie, P. T. Devanbu, and V. Filkov. Measuring the effect of social communications on individual working rhythms: A case study of open source software. In SocialInformatics, pages 78--85, 2012.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Less is More? An Empirical Study on Configuration Issues in Python PyPI EcosystemProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639077(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
  • (2024)Understanding User Feedback in Software Ecosystems: A Study on Challenges and Mitigation StrategiesSoftware Business10.1007/978-3-031-53227-6_10(132-147)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2024
  • (2023)A Closer Look at the Security Risks in the Rust EcosystemACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/362473833:2(1-30)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
ECSAW '15: Proceedings of the 2015 European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops
September 2015
364 pages
ISBN:9781450333931
DOI:10.1145/2797433
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 September 2015

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

ECSAW '15
ECSAW '15: 2015 European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops
September 7 - 11, 2015
Cavtat, Dubrovnik, Croatia

Acceptance Rates

ECSAW '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 51 of 77 submissions, 66%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 120 submissions, 67%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)21
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
Reflects downloads up to 12 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Less is More? An Empirical Study on Configuration Issues in Python PyPI EcosystemProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639077(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
  • (2024)Understanding User Feedback in Software Ecosystems: A Study on Challenges and Mitigation StrategiesSoftware Business10.1007/978-3-031-53227-6_10(132-147)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2024
  • (2023)A Closer Look at the Security Risks in the Rust EcosystemACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/362473833:2(1-30)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2023
  • (2023)An Empirical Study of Yanked Releases in the Rust Package RegistryIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.315214849:1(437-449)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
  • (2023)Business Model for Indie Studios in Game Software EcosystemsGrand Research Challenges in Games and Entertainment Computing in Brazil - GranDGamesBR 2020–203010.1007/978-3-031-27639-2_3(47-66)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2023
  • (2023)AMINO: A quality assessment framework for modeling ecosystemsJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.2603Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
  • (2021)A Systematic Mapping Study on Requirements Engineering in Software EcosystemsResearch Anthology on Recent Trends, Tools, and Implications of Computer Programming10.4018/978-1-7998-3016-0.ch056(1202-1226)Online publication date: 2021
  • (2021)Analyzing and Visualizing Projects and their Relations in Software Ecosystems2021 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)10.1109/VISSOFT52517.2021.00020(105-109)Online publication date: Sep-2021
  • (2021)An Empirical Study of Dependency Downgrades in the npm EcosystemIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.295213047:11(2457-2470)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
  • (2021)Health is Wealth: Evaluating the Health of the Bitcoin Ecosystem in GitHub2021 IEEE/ACM 4th International Workshop on Software Health in Projects, Ecosystems and Communities (SoHeal)10.1109/SoHeal52568.2021.00007(1-8)Online publication date: May-2021
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media