Service-Oriented Computing – ICSOC 2013 Workshops

Abstract

Software ecosystems - a group of actors, one or more business models that serve these actors in a possible wider sense than direct revenues, one or more software platforms that the business models are built upon and the relationships of the actors and business models - are gaining importance in software development as a way of increasing software innovation, decreasing internal development cost, and spreading software platforms. Software quality, not only of individual applications or components, but also of the software ecosystems as a whole is important, but has not received much attention so far. We here aim to explore to which extent composition of components from a software ecosystem influences software quality. We do this in order to provide groundwork for application awareness of software quality in a software ecosystem context. We ran the same Maven build tasks in 15 simultaneous releases (including associated service releases) of Eclipse and measured time, energy, and memory performance. Based on an analysis of the plugins installed with the versions of Eclipse, we next found the structure of the subset of the Eclipse software ecosystem that was used in each version. The performance measurements and computed structure were then analyzed and compared. We found that performance and structure changed considerably throughout versions of Eclipse. While we found no direct correlation between the evolution of the two, our exploratory study warrants further study. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.