A Technology-Neutral Role-Based Collaboration Model for Software Ecosystems

  • Ştefan Stănciulescu
  • Daniela Rabiser
  • Christoph Seidl
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 9953)

Abstract

In large-scale software ecosystems, many developers contribute extensions to a common software platform. Due to the independent development efforts and the lack of a central steering mechanism, similar functionality may be developed multiple times by different developers. We tackle this problem by contributing a role-based collaboration model for software ecosystems to make such implicit similarities explicit and to raise awareness among developers during their ongoing efforts. We extract this model based on realization artifacts in a specific programming language located in a particular source code repository and present it in a technology-neutral way. We capture five essential collaborations as independent role models that may be composed to present developer collaborations of a software ecosystem in their entirety, which fosters overview of the software ecosystem, analyses of duplicated development efforts and information of ongoing development efforts. Finally, using the collaborations defined in the formalism we model real artifacts from Marlin, a firmware for 3D printers, and we show that for the selected scenarios, the five collaborations were sufficient to raise awareness and make implicit information explicit.

Keywords

Software ecosystem Collaboration Role modeling Marlin 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Christian Doppler Forschungsgesellschaft, Austria and KEBA AG, Austria. Further, this work was partially supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation) under grant SCHA1635/2-2 and by the European Commission within the project HyVar (grant agreement H2020-644298).

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing AG 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Ştefan Stănciulescu
    • 1
  • Daniela Rabiser
    • 2
  • Christoph Seidl
    • 3
  1. 1.IT University of CopenhagenCopenhagenDenmark
  2. 2.CD Lab MEVSSJohannes Kepler University LinzLinzAustria
  3. 3.Technische Universität BraunschweigBraunschweigGermany

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