Software Evolution in an Industrial Automation Ecosystem: An Exploratory Study

In software ecosystems (SECOs) both internal and external engineers develop software solutions for specific market segments and customers based on common technological platforms. SECOs pose new challenges for software engineering as the platforms are evolved by different development teams and communities. Despite a significant body of research only few empirical results are available on software evolution in SECOs. This paper reports results of an exploratory case study on change characteristics in an industrial automation SECO. We apply Buckley et al.´s framework of software change to characterize evolution in an industrial automation SECO. We further discuss evolution challenges we derived from our analyses.