Designing software ecosystems: How can modeling techniques help?

Abstract

It has become an increasingly common practice for software companies to collaborate with external developers in order to develop software platforms for a shared market, constituting software ecosystems. Creating and sustaining a software ecosystem is a challenging problem that involves numerous technical, organizational, and business concerns. To support the systematic design of software ecosystems, modeling is a crucial tool. In this paper, we (a) identify a set of descriptive and analytical requirements raised in the design of software ecosystems; (b) review several modeling techniques used for describing and examining software ecosystems; and (c) assess the support of the reviewed techniques towards addressing the identified requirements. The results provide insight into the gaps between the issues raised in the design of software ecosystems, and the coverage of the studied techniques, suggesting an agenda for future research.