O setor de software e seu uso vêm crescendo em todo o mundo, incluindo o Brasil. Observa-se um panorama de mudanças na produção de software, com tendência crescente de desenvolvimento em parcerias em vez do modelo tradicional. Nessa nova abordagem, chamada de Ecossistema de Software (ECOS), uma empresa constrói uma comunidade de desenvolvedores ao redor de seu produto principal para atender melhor às crescentes demandas de seus clientes. O entendimento dessas mudanças e seus impactos nas empresas atuantes nesse setor no Brasil é importante e ainda se encontra em maturação Entre as lacunas estão a criação de modelos para estudo e caracterização de ECOS, além do estudo de seus aspectos de negócio, sociais e técnicos. Este trabalho concentrou-se na análise dos dois primeiros aspectos, com foco em como atores chamados niche players (ou parceiros) têm que se adaptar para atuar de acordo com a nova abordagem, adaptando-se a regras e imposições de atores keystone (empresas centrais). Para possibilitar a compreensão da formação e funcionamento do ECOS, o trabalho propôs e testou um framework, baseado na literatura, que permitiu essa caracterização de forma abrangente. Para abordar tais questões, foi usada a metodologia de estudo de casos múltiplos na análise de empresas parceiras que atuam em grandes ECOS presentes no Brasil. Foram constatadas diversas adaptações nos aspectos de negócio e sociais dos parceiros, como adoção de modelo de negócios específicos e adaptações nas equipes. A profundidade dessas adaptações depende do modelo e da forma de trabalho da keystone - havendo muita variação de um ECOS para outro. O framework teórico proposto para caracterização foi adequado e permitiu o entendimento de diversos aspectos dos ECOS estudados pela unificação de outros frameworks e aspectos abordados por outros autores - e esse modelo é uma das principais contribuições deste trabalho. O confronto de algumas afirmações extraídas da bibliografia com casos reais foi outro ponto importante, contribuindo com a construção da teoria sobre o tema. / The software industry have been growing all over the world, including Brazil. A panorama of changes in software production is observed, with a growing trend of development in partnerships rather than the traditional model. In this new approach, called the Software Ecosystem (SECO), a company builds a community of developers around its core product to better meet the growing demands of its customers. The understanding of these changes and their impacts on companies operating in this sector in Brazil is important and is still maturing. Among the gaps are the creation of models to study and characterize SECO, as well as the study of their business, social and technical aspects. This work concentrates on the analysis of the first two aspects, focusing on how actors called niche players have to adapt to act according to the new approach, adapting to rules and impositions of keystones. To allow the understanding of SECOs formation and functioning, the work proposed and tested a framework, based on the literature, that allowed this characterization comprehensively. To address such issues, the multiple case study methodology was used in the analysis of niche players that operate in large ECOS present in Brazil. There were several adaptations in the business and social aspects of the partners, such as adoption of a specific business model and adaptations in the teams. The depth of these adaptations depends on the model and how the keystone works - there is a lot of variation from one SECO to another. The proposed theoretical framework for characterization was adequate and allowed the understanding of several aspects of studied cases by the unification of other frameworks and aspects addressed by other authors - and this framework is one of the main contributions of this work. The confrontation of some statements extracted from the bibliography with real cases was another important point, in the sense of having contributed with the construction of the theory on the subject.

O setor de software e seu uso vêm crescendo em todo o mundo, incluindo o Brasil. Observa-se um panorama de mudanças na produção de software, com tendência crescente de desenvolvimento em parcerias em vez do modelo tradicional. Nessa nova abordagem, chamada de Ecossistema de Software (ECOS), uma empresa constrói uma comunidade de desenvolvedores ao redor de seu produto principal para atender melhor às crescentes demandas de seus clientes. O entendimento dessas mudanças e seus impactos nas empresas atuantes nesse setor no Brasil é importante e ainda se encontra em maturação Entre as lacunas estão a criação de modelos para estudo e caracterização de ECOS, além do estudo de seus aspectos de negócio, sociais e técnicos. Este trabalho concentrou-se na análise dos dois primeiros aspectos, com foco em como atores chamados niche players (ou parceiros) têm que se adaptar para atuar de acordo com a nova abordagem, adaptando-se a regras e imposições de atores keystone (empresas centrais). Para possibilitar a compreensão da formação e funcionamento do ECOS, o trabalho propôs e testou um framework, baseado na literatura, que permitiu essa caracterização de forma abrangente. Para abordar tais questões, foi usada a metodologia de estudo de casos múltiplos na análise de empresas parceiras que atuam em grandes ECOS presentes no Brasil. Foram constatadas diversas adaptações nos aspectos de negócio e sociais dos parceiros, como adoção de modelo de negócios específicos e adaptações nas equipes. A profundidade dessas adaptações depende do modelo e da forma de trabalho da keystone - havendo muita variação de um ECOS para outro. O framework teórico proposto para caracterização foi adequado e permitiu o entendimento de diversos aspectos dos ECOS estudados pela unificação de outros frameworks e aspectos abordados por outros autores - e esse modelo é uma das principais contribuições deste trabalho. O confronto de algumas afirmações extraídas da bibliografia com casos reais foi outro ponto importante, contribuindo com a construção da teoria sobre o tema. / The software industry have been growing all over the world, including Brazil. A panorama of changes in software production is observed, with a growing trend of development in partnerships rather than the traditional model. In this new approach, called the Software Ecosystem (SECO), a company builds a community of developers around its core product to better meet the growing demands of its customers. The understanding of these changes and their impacts on companies operating in this sector in Brazil is important and is still maturing. Among the gaps are the creation of models to study and characterize SECO, as well as the study of their business, social and technical aspects. This work concentrates on the analysis of the first two aspects, focusing on how actors called niche players have to adapt to act according to the new approach, adapting to rules and impositions of keystones. To allow the understanding of SECOs formation and functioning, the work proposed and tested a framework, based on the literature, that allowed this characterization comprehensively. To address such issues, the multiple case study methodology was used in the analysis of niche players that operate in large ECOS present in Brazil. There were several adaptations in the business and social aspects of the partners, such as adoption of a specific business model and adaptations in the teams. The depth of these adaptations depends on the model and how the keystone works - there is a lot of variation from one SECO to another. The proposed theoretical framework for characterization was adequate and allowed the understanding of several aspects of studied cases by the unification of other frameworks and aspects addressed by other authors - and this framework is one of the main contributions of this work. The confrontation of some statements extracted from the bibliography with real cases was another important point, in the sense of having contributed with the construction of the theory on the subject.

Releasing software is challenging. To decide when to release software, developers may consider a deadline, a set of features or quality attributes. Yet, there are many stories of software that is not released on time. In large-scale software development, release management requires significant communication and coordination. It is particularly challenging in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystems, in which hundreds of loosely connected developers and their projects are coordinated for releasing software according to a schedule. In this work, we investigate the release management process in two large-scale FOSS development projects. In particular, our focus is the communication in the whole release management process in each ecosystem across multiple releases. The main research questions addressed in this dissertation are: (1) How do developers in these FOSS ecosystems communicate and coordinate to build and release a common product based on different projects? (2) What are the release management tasks in a FOSS ecosystem? and (3) What are the challenges that release managers face in a FOSS ecosystem? To understand this process and its challenges better, we used a multiple case study methodology, and colleced evidence from a combination of the following sources: documents, archival records, interviews, direct observation, participant observation, and physical artifacts. We conducted the case studies on two FLOSS software ecosystems: GNOME and OpenStack. We analyzed over two and half years of communication in each ecosystem and studied developers’ interactions. GNOME is a collection of libraries, system services, and end-user applications; together, these projects provide a unified desktop —the GNOME desktop. OpenStack is a collection of software tools for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public and private clouds. We catalogued communication channels, categorized coordination activities in one channel, and triangulated our results by interviewing key developers identified through social network analysis. We found factors that impact the release process in a software ecosystem, including a release schedule positively, influence instead of direct control, and diversity. The release schedule drives most of the communication within an ecosystem. To achieve a concerted release, a Release Team helps developers reach technical consensus through influence rather than direct control. The diverse composition of the Release Team might increase its reach and influence in the ecosystem. Our results can help organizations build better large-scale teams and show that software engineering research focused on individual projects might miss important parts of the picture. The contributions of this dissertation are: (1) an empirical study of release management in two FOSS ecosystems (2) a set of lessons learned from the case studies, and (3) a theory of release management in FOSS ecosystems. We summarize our theory that explains our understanding of release management in FOSS ecosystems as three statements: (1) the size and complexity of the integrated product is constrained by the release managers capacity, (2) release management should be capable of reaching the whole ecosystem, and (3) the release managers need social and technical skills. The dissertation discusses this theory in the light of the case studies, other research efforts, and its implications. / Graduate / 0984 / gpoo+proquest@calcifer.org

Software projects are not developed in isolation. Open source software projects encourage a networked collaboration and interdependence across projects and developers. Recent research has shifted to studying software ecosystems, communities of projects that depend on each other and are developed together. However, identifying technical dependencies at the ecosystem level can be challenging. In this dissertation, we propose a new method, known as reference coupling, for detecting technical dependencies between projects. The method establishes dependencies through user-specified cross-references between projects. We use our method to identify ecosystems in GitHub hosted projects, and we identify several characteristics of the identified ecosystems. Our findings show that most ecosystems are centered around one project and are interconnected with other ecosystems. The predominant type of ecosystems are those that develop tools to support software development. We also found that the project owners’ social behavior aligns well with the technical dependencies within the ecosystem, but project contributors’ social behavior does not align with these dependencies. We conclude with a discussion on future research that is enabled by our reference coupling method. / Graduate / harrison.franc@gmail.com

M.Sc. (Information Technology) / In Africa, the economy is largely dominated by SMMEs that represent 90% of private businesses and contribute to more than 50% of employment and GDP. However, these SMMEs struggle to sustain their businesses in the current economic climate. To address this, advancements in mobile and cloud technology introduce new possibilities such as digital business ecosystems to support environment where small, micro, and medium enterprises can interoperate. The fundamental challenge for SMMEs in a digital business ecosystem is the selection of transaction partners. SMMEs are interested to transact with other SMMEs that will benefit their business through successful transactions. This leads to the sustainability and growth of SMMEs and consequently the economy. However, not all SMMEs behave as predicted and therefore, being able to trust another SMME in the digital business ecosystem is important. Trust is an essential part of business and personal life. The social nature of trust makes trust very personalised and for each individual, trust is interpreted, understood and perceived according to past experience and social behaviour. These factors are largely influenced by cultural norms and behaviours that individuals conform to. In African and some other regions, collectivist cultural norms and behaviours are common whereas in Westernised regions, individualist cultures are common. Therefore, it is not enough to just consider trust from a technical perspective but also from a cultural perspective. For small businesses in Africa and other regions in the world, this is especially true. Compared to larger companies in developed economies, SMMEs in Africa are more informal and operate in a more personal manner. This implies that trust decisions are largely influence an owner or employee’s cultural norms and behaviour. The research conducted in this dissertation proposes a trust model, known as Trustcv that supports the cultural norms and behaviours of collectivist cultures for trust in a digital business ecosystem. Digital business ecosystems, trust, culture and social network analysis provide the literature foundation for Trustcv. The effectiveness of Trustcv is measured through simulations of a digital business ecosystem in Africa, which provides interesting results compared to an existing trust model. The results indicate that Trustcv could be used to support trust in collectivist digital business ecosystems used by collectivist cultural SMMEs.

Software systems increasingly interact with each other, forming ecosystems. Cloud is one such ecosystem that has evolved and enabled other technologies like IoT and containers. Such systems are very complex and heterogeneous because their components can have diverse origins, functions, security policies, and communication protocols, which makes it difficult to comprehend, utilize and consequently secure them. Abstract architectural models can be used to handle this complexity and heterogeneity but there is lack of work on precise, implementation/vendor neutral and holistic models which represent ecosystem components and their mutual interactions. We attempted to find similarities in systems and generalize to create abstract models for adding security. We represented the ecosystem as a Reference architecture (RA) and the ecosystem units as patterns. We started with a pattern diagram which showed all the components involved along with their mutual interactions and dependencies. We added components to the already existent Cloud security RA (SRA). Containers, being relatively new virtualization technology, did not have a precise and holistic reference architecture. We have built a partial RA for containers by identifying and modeling components of the ecosystem. Container security issues were identified from the literature as well as analysis of our patterns. We added corresponding security countermeasures to container RA as security patterns to build a container SRA. Finally, using container SRA as an example, we demonstrated an approach for RA validation. We have also built a composite pattern for fog computing that is an intermediate platform between Cloud and IoT devices. We represented an attack, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) using IoT devices, in the form of a misuse pattern which explains it from the attacker’s perspective. We found this modelbased approach useful to build RAs in a flexible and incremental way as components can be identified and added as the ecosystems expand. This provided us better insight to analyze security issues across boundaries of individual ecosystems. A unified, precise and holistic view of the system is not just useful for adding or evaluating security, this approach can also be used to ensure compliance, privacy, safety, reliability and/or governance for cloud and related ecosystems. This is the first work we know of where patterns and RAs are used to represent ecosystems and analyze their security. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2016-06-16T19:17:50Z No. of bitstreams: 1 welingtondaveigasilva.pdf: 5470630 bytes, checksum: b0cd58fa025d05859ac944cc8bd7dc6a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2016-07-13T14:26:23Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 welingtondaveigasilva.pdf: 5470630 bytes, checksum: b0cd58fa025d05859ac944cc8bd7dc6a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-13T14:26:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 welingtondaveigasilva.pdf: 5470630 bytes, checksum: b0cd58fa025d05859ac944cc8bd7dc6a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-03-21 / A presença de ambientes de e-Learning na academia e nas empresas é uma realidade e há uma forte tendência de crescimento de seu uso devido a vantagens como flexibilidade e custo. Juntam-se a isso características como aprendizado informal, por meio de dispositivos móveis e ao longo da vida e a crescente disponibilidade de recursos educacionais na web e em dispositivos móveis com alto nível de qualidade. Para acompanhar essa evolução, as organizações responsáveis pelos ambientes de e-Learning investem para desenvolver recursos e serviços educacionais, muitas vezes equivalentes em mais de uma plataforma, dificultando a inovação e o compartilhamento dos mesmos. Neste cenário, é quase inviável que uma única organização consiga incorporar todas as inovações do domínio educacional. Essa dissertação apresenta o BROAD-ECOS, uma abordagem sob a perspectiva de Ecossistemas de e-Learning que identifica indivíduos, comunidades, organizações e recursos de software nesse ambiente e define uma arquitetura para transformar ambientes de e-Learning existentes em plataformas que permitam a integração de serviços educacionais externos e favoreçam o desenvolvimento, compartilhamento e reúso de serviços educacionais compatíveis em um contexto inter-organizacional. Para tal, esses serviços possuem controle do nível de integração e suporte a um modelo comum que permite a interoperabilidade entre diferentes fornecedores, além de serem baseados em padrões abertos, bibliotecas comuns e documentação acessível. A avaliação da proposta foi feita em duas etapas. Primeiro, os elementos do ecossistema identificados foram validados por meio de um questionário aplicado a profissionais com experiência em e-Learning, tanto da academia quanto da área de treinamento empresarial. Depois foram realizados cenários de uso para avaliar os artefatos desenvolvidos quanto aos objetivos propostos, o que se justifica pela necessidade de demonstrar a viabilidade técnica dos conceitos e das tecnologias envolvidas em um contexto real de utilização. Os resultados obtidos apresentam indícios da viabilidade da proposta. / The use of Virtual Learning Environments in academic and corporative training is a real fact and there is a strong trend of growing because of advantages such as flexibility and cost. Besides that features as informal learning through mobile devices and lifelong learning, and the increasing availability of high quality educational resources on the web and on mobile devices must be considered. To keep up with this evolution, the organizations responsible for e-learning environments invest to develop educational resources and services, frequently equivalent in more than one platform, hindering innovation and sharing. In this scenario, it is almost impossible that a single organization incorporates all the innovations in the educational domain. This dissertation presents, in the perspective of Software Ecosystem, the BROAD-ECOS approach, identifying individuals, communities, organizations and software resources that comprise them, and defining an infrastructure to turn the existing Virtual Learning Environments into platforms that allow the integration of external educational services, promoting the development, sharing and reuse of compatible educational services in an inter-organizational context. These services have control of the integration level and support for a common model, which enables interoperability among different providers, and are based on open standards, common libraries and accessible documentation. The evaluation of the proposal was done in two steps. The first one validated the ecosystem elements by means of a questionnaire, applied to professionals with experience in e-Learning, both from academia and business training area. Then, scenarios were performed to evaluate the artifacts considering the proposed goals, justified by the need to demonstrate the technical feasibility of concepts and technologies involved in a real context of use. The results showed the feasibility of the proposal.

Context: The explosive growth of renowned software ecosystems such as the cloud-based accounting platform Xero, and the communication hub Slack has largely occurred because of an app marketplace they have built. To a large extent, in-app marketplaces are becoming mandatory for SaaS companies. Looking at the 15 largest SaaS companies, all of them have an app marketplace with a median number of 347 applications integrated to the marketplace [1]. It is challenging for any organization to orchestrate a platform independently. The more other participants contribute to that platform, greater resources are applied to create richer offerings for the platform’s end-users. Looking at the initial stages of when an organization transitions from a product to platform development, there is an underlying challenge of how that organization attracts third-party developers to partner and enrich the ecosystem. Objective: This thesis aims to identify what can be used to attract third-party developers or organizations to develop and integrate onto an emerging platform or- ganization. It also examines problem areas faced by emerging software ecosystems when trying to attract third-party developers onto their platform. Method: I performed a case study to investigate the needs of third-party devel- opers looking to develop on a platform organization. I also used mixed data collection to obtain different sources of information, including internal and external interviews, virtual events, an internal developer workshop, and an investigation of competitors and other software ecosystems. Results: The thesis highlights that emerging software ecosystems often do not have the resources or capacity to build an initial robust platform experience as some of the more established software ecosystems like HubSpot and Shopify. With the lack of research completed to date on emerging software ecosystems, I was motivated to investigate the best practices that are crucial to attract third-party developers onto the platform. Conclusion: Through thematic analysis, the study revealed eight emerging con- cepts. When transitioning to a software ecosystem, organizations have struggled with six common issues. Additionally, six recommendations were gathered to help guide emerging software ecosystems towards best practices to attract third-party developers onto their platform. / Graduate

Variability modeling is one of the key disciplines to cope with complex variability in large software product lines. It aims at creating, evolving, and configuring variability models, which describe the common and variable characteristics, also known as features, of products in a product line. Since the introduction of feature models more than twenty years ago, many variability modeling languages and notations have been proposed both in academia and industry, followed by hundreds of publications on variability modeling techniques that have built upon these theoretical foundations. Surprisingly, there are relatively few empirical studies that aim at understanding the use of such languages. What variability modeling concepts are actually used in practice? Do variability models applied in real-world look similar to those published in literature? In what technical and organizational contexts are variability models applicable? We present an empirical study that addresses this research gap. Our goals are i) to verify existing theoretical research, and ii) to explore real-world variability modeling languages and models expressed in them. We study concepts and semantics of variability modeling languages conceived by practitioners, and the usage of these concepts in real, large-scale models. Our aim is to support variability modeling research by providing empirical data about the use of its core modeling concepts, by identifying and characterizing further concepts that have not been as widely addressed, and by providing realistic assumptions about scale, structure, content, and complexity of real-world variability models. We believe that our findings are of relevance to variability modeling researchers and tool designers, for example, those working on interactive product configurators or feature dependency checkers. Our extracted models provide realistic benchmarks that can be used to evaluate new techniques. Recognizing the recent trend in software engineering to open up software platforms to facilitate inter-organizational reuse of software, we extend our empirical discourse to the emerging field of software ecosystems. As natural successors of successful product lines, ecosystems manage huge variability among and within their software assets, thus, represent a highly interesting class of systems to study variability modeling concepts and mechanisms. Our studied systems comprise eleven highly configurable software systems, two ecosystems with closed platforms, and three ecosystems relying on open platforms. Some of our subjects are among the largest successful systems in existence today. Results from a survey on industrial variability modeling complement these subjects. Our overall results provide empirical evidence that the well-researched concepts of feature modeling are used in practice, but also that more advanced concepts are needed. We observe that assumptions about variability models in the literature do not hold. Our study also reveals that variability models work best in centralized variability management scenarios, and that they are fragile and have to be controlled by a small team. We also identify a particular type of dependencies that is increasingly used in open platforms and helps sustain the growth of ecosystems. Interestingly, while enabling distributed variability, these dependencies rely on a centralized and stable vocabulary. Finally, we formulate new hypotheses and research questions that provide direction for future research.

This is a qualitative exploratory study of Software Architecture in Cyber-Physical Ecosystems. Software Architecture plays a pivotal role to Software Ecosystems and, apart from Functional and non-Functional requirements, it is affected by factors of a different nature. The purpose of this paper is to identify these factors and describe their relationship with the ecosystem’s architecture. Several owners of Cyber-Physical systems are in the process of setting up new ecosystems by sharing functionalities of their proprietary platform with third-party developers. This makes Architecture that supports Open Innovation critical to this endeavor. We believe that the application of Software Ecosystem best practices  to the domain of Cyber-Physical Systems is an interesting subject. An exploratory literature study was conducted to create a conceptual model which describes the relationship of architecture with the factors presented above. This study resulted in a conceptual model which supports the decision making process of the platform owner during the various stages of the ecosystem’s lifecycle.