Towards the Analysis of Software Projects Dependencies: An Exploratory Visual Study of Software Ecosystems.
Francisco W. Santana, Cláudia Maria Lima Werner · 2013
Software systems are rarely developed in isolation. The development of current complex software systems often makes extensive use of components previously developed or acquired from external suppliers. Nevertheless, research on software systems has traditionally considered each system as an isolated and self-contained project. Such characteristic limits the quality of observations on studies as they do not consider the software ecosystem in which the project is inserted. In this paper we present an ongoing work that aims to enable the analysis of software ecosystems from both technical and sociotechnical perspectives. The novelty of our approach lies in the usage of interactive visualizations to facilitate uncovering relationships among software projects within an ecosystem.