Simone da Silva Amorim

Extensibility in ecosystem architectures: an initial study

Organizations that build software-intensive products participate in socio-technical ecosystems that encompass their collaborators, competitors, customers, and suppliers. STREAM, an ecosystem modeling method, provides three views of that ecosystem: business, software, and innovation. In the software view the architecture is the primary structuring element. It is our hypothesis that certain quality attributes of the architecture, such as expressiveness and extensibility, are important factors in the success of the ecosystem. Extensibility is normally presented through the API. We examine the APIs of three platforms, one that is increasing in use, one that is in steady use, and one that is declining in use. We use these initial results to generate hypotheses for further exploration.

Scalability of Ecosystem Architectures

The goal of this research is to understand the various dimensions along which the architectures in an ecosystem should scale to support successful software-intensive products. We used a case study approach in which we first identified characteristics of scalability from the research literature and then examined ecosystems to determine the extent to which their primary architectures possessed these characteristics. We also examined the architectures of the platform extensions. We found that each architecture exhibited those characteristics although through different mechanisms and to different degrees.

How Has the Health of Software Ecosystems Been Evaluated?: A Systematic Review

The health of the software ecosystems concerns to the growing and continuity to exist remaining variable and productive over time. Research on this area is becoming more important. Even today, no studies have been available summarizing the research on evaluation approaches for the health of software ecosystems. The objective of this study is to structure and analyze the available literature on this field identifying the state-of-the-art of the research. We conducted a systematic literature review to obtain an overview of the existing studies in this area. 23 studies were selected as primary studies by applying inclusion, exclusion and quality criteria. The findings show that the research area is quite immature. There are few approaches and tools to support the evaluation work. In these studies, only 3 reported a complete evaluation of the health of ecosystems, 5 studies were considered as initial proposals, and the others evaluated the health partially.

Software ecosystems architectural health: challenges x practices

Over time many software ecosystems have achieved success. Several organizations are opening their software projects for external businesses, creating an multi-organizational government to development their software platform The software architecture has an important participation in this success. In this context, there are some studies describing architectural challenges for software ecosystems, but little research is investigating how these challenges are being faced by software ecosystems organizations. This paper presents an initial investigation how open source software (OSS) ecosystems have faced several architectural challenges. We conducted interviews with three architects of different OSS ecosystems and gathered some architectural practices to lead with challenges. We also analyzed how these architectural practices have influenced the software ecosystem health, introducing the concept of Software Ecosystems Architectural Health.

Flexibility in Ecosystem Architectures

Quality attributes are important to creating, understanding, and evaluating software architectures. The architectural attributes and challenges for ecosystem architectures are different from one-off systems. The study of those aspects that influence quality attributes in this new environment can help to understand these architectures. In previous work, we hypothesized that the architecture for an ecosystem should be extensible, scalable, and flexible and reported initial investigations into extensibility and scalability. In this paper, we report on our investigation into flexibility. We analyze various features that impact how to design flexible architectures. We highlight that flexibility for ecosystems is not only a technical issue, but a business issue as well. We classified features that affect flexibility into business and technical dimensions. We adapted a software system metric for flexibility to measure the flexibility of an ecosystems architecture.

Towards an evaluation method for software ecosystem practices

Many software ecosystems have achieved success in recent years. Practices adopted by them are responsible for guiding their evolution and keeping the ecosystem health. However, there is not an accepted quality process model, framework or method for evaluating the essential practices that are commonly used in a software ecosystem. This paper proposes an evaluation method for software ecosystem practices and a research plan for developing such a method. We focus on the practices and metrics that can improve various facets of the ecosystem, and contributes to achieving good health for the ecosystem. These practices and metrics are modeled by three views of the ecosystem: community, business and technical. We illustrate an initial representation that summarizes the steps of the method and the identification of key areas that are relevant to the practices.

Understanding the Effects of Practices on KDE Ecosystem Health

Open source software ecosystems have adjusted and evolved a set of practices over the years to support the delivery of sustainable software. However, few studies have investigated the impacts of such practices on the health of these ecosystems. In this paper, we present the results of an ethnographic-based study conducted during the Latin-American KDE users and contributors meeting (LaKademy 2015) with the goal of collecting practices used within the KDE ecosystem and understanding how they affect ecosystem health. The analysis was based on softgoal interdependency graphs adapted to represent practices and relate them to non-functional requirements and goals. Our results provide a preliminary insight to understand how KDE ecosystem community interacts, which working practices have been adopted and how they affect ecosystem health.

When Ecosystems Collide: Making Systems of Systems Work

The objective of this research is to identify issues that arise when software systems from different ecosystems are composed into a system of systems. Whether it is an explicit, managed ecosystem or the implicit ecosystem of collaborators, competitors, and users that surrounds any organization, the community of organizations has momentum in a particular direction. When a system of systems is composed using systems from each of several ecosystems the differences in communities can prevent satisfactory integration. We examine the case of a portion of the infrastructure needed to support automated driving. We use Maiers criteria that identify challenges for systems of systems as starting points for investigations into differences among ecosystems. We found points of commonality that tie together the ecosystems include use of common standards, membership by large organizations in multiple ecosystems, and influences of the outside business environment. We also found points of variation including whether the systems have compatible real-time expectations, terms of licenses, frequency of new releases, and architectural assumptions. Developers of a system of systems benefit from being aware of the similarities and differences among the ecosystems from which their systems originate because both the similarities and differences help developers anticipate the evolutionary trajectories of the individual systems.

Educating to achieve healthy open source ecosystems

When developers contribute to an open source software ecosystem project, they follow practices defined by governing authorities, architects, maintainers, committers, and other stakeholders. Many of these practices are incorporated into training videos and guidelines for newcomers to guide the work of contributors, including architectural practices that influence the quality of the software product and the health of the open source ecosystem. This research is investigating architectural practices intended to orient and train newcomers during their first contacts with the ecosystem. This includes using the software architecture to trace a picture of how the education artifacts have been built to achieve a healthy ecosystem. This research identifies architectural practices spread by some training resources and analyzes how these practices contribute to achieving a healthy ecosystem. Our research method consisted of a qualitative study conducted with data obtained from various training sources. The findings show the connection between existing education for newcomers and their possible impact to achieve healthy open source ecosystems.

The Architect's Role in Software Ecosystems Health

Software ecosystems have adopted many different strategies to achieve success and good health. The role of software architect is one of the main contributors to that success. Their activities are crucial for realizing the business strategy of their organization. Software ecosystems define multi-sided markets that require different strategies from a traditional two-sided market. The architectural practices in the multi-sided market must support the need for flexibility and rapid reaction. These new demands broaden our understanding of the software architects role and the impact of their action on ecosystem structure. In particular the need to understand how to operate in a collaborative, cooperative environment to exploit competition. In this position paper, we discuss how software architects actions influence the ecosystem health through their indicators: productivity, niche creation, and robustness.