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The Influence of Technical Variety in Software Ecosystems

Published: 25 September 2020 Publication History

Abstract

There is a lack of empirical evidence on software ecosystem health metrics, and a need for operationalizable metrics that describe software ecosystem characteristics. This study unveils a new approach for measuring technical variety concisely. Studies show that a high variety opens up new opportunities and thus, better niche creation, and ultimately, improves software ecosystem health. Four different ecosystems are evaluated, and compared. Variety is measured in relation to robustness, and productivity metrics of the ecosystem to uncover the influence of technical variety on software ecosystems. Technical variety indicates a positive correlation with robustness, however acceptance of this statement is not confirmed with certainty due to a weak relation. Furthermore, significant relations indicate differences between ecosystem types.

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    ICSEW'20: Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops
    June 2020
    831 pages
    ISBN:9781450379632
    DOI:10.1145/3387940
    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 the author(s) 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].

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    Published: 25 September 2020

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    Author Tags

    1. Niche Creation
    2. Software Ecosystem Health
    3. Software Ecosystems
    4. Technical Variety

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    ICSE '20
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    ICSE '20: 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering
    June 27 - July 19, 2020
    Seoul, Republic of Korea

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