Improving activity in communities of practice through software release management
Kevin van Ingen, Job van Ommen, Slinger Jansen · 2011
Keystone players, the company that occupies the crucial hubs, need to nurture its inhabitants to keep the ecosystem active. Many modern ecosystems have communities of practice where knowledge is transferred by collaborative problem solving, sharing of ideas, software components or configurations. In recent years a widely spread medium for communities of practice is the use of online discussion boards. This research proposes a method to analyze the relationship between software releases and activity in a community. This paper explains how software ecosystem Keystone companies can use software product release management to cultivate communities of practice using an illustrative case study. In this case study a comparison is made between two communities in the Android ecosystem. The results show peaks in community activity coinciding with the software releases. The release not only revitalizes the activity of the developers but the heterogeneous community in its entirety.