Towards Laws of Software Ecosystem Evolution: An Empirical Comparison of Seven Package Dependency Networks
Tom Mens, Alexandre Decan · ORBi UMONS · 2017
We carry out a quantitative empirical comparison of the macro-level evolution of software packaging ecosystems for a multitude of differ- ent programming languages. We report on the most important observed differences and commonalities in the evolution of their package dependency networks. We hypothesise that the observed commonalities emerge due to the ecosystem scale and complexity. Inspired by Lehman's laws of software evolution, we seek evidence for a series of empirically observable 'laws of software ecosystem evolution'