NDLI: Ecosystems in GitHub and a method for ecosystem identification using reference coupling

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Damian, Daniela Blincoe, Kelly Harrison, Francis
Abstract	Software projects are not developed in isolation. 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 paper, 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. We find 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 behaviour aligns well with the technical dependencies within the ecosystem, but project contributors' social behaviour does not align with these dependencies. We conclude with a discussion on future research that is enabled by our reference coupling method.
Starting Page	202
Ending Page	207
Page Count	6
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9780769555942
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	2015-05-16
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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Ecosystems in GitHub and a method for ecosystem identification using reference coupling