Designing, Developing, and Implementing Software Ecosystems: Towards a Step-wise Guide

Abstract

The notion of software ecosystems has been popular both in research and industry for more than a decade, but how software ecosystems are created still remains unclear. This becomes more of a challenge if one examines the “creation” of ecosystems that have high probability in surviving in the future, i.e. with respect to ecosystem health. In this paper, we focus on the creation of software ecosystems and propose a process for designing, developing, and establishing software ecosystems based on three basic steps and a set of activities for each step. We note that software ecosystem research identifies that ecosystems typically emerge from either a company deciding to allow development on their product platform or from a successful open source project. In our study we add to this knowledge by demonstrating, through two case studies, that ecosystems can emerge from more than a technological infrastructure (platform). We identify that ecosystems can emerge out of two more distinct types of environments and thus the design should be based on the characteristics of this categorization. Moreover, we follow the approach that design, development, and establishment are not three distinct phases but rather aspects of a single re-iterating phase and thus propose the view of design, development, and establishment as a continous process, running in parallel with and interrelated to the monitoring of the ecosystem evolution.