Software Ecosystems: Trends and Impacts on Software Engineering

Economic and social issues are pointed out as Software Engineering (SE) challenges for the next years, since the field needs to treat issues beyond the technical side. These challenges require analyzing the field of SE from another perspective. In this sense, the study of software ecosystems (SECOs) is an emerging discipline that investigates the relationships among companies in the software industry. Companies work cooperatively and competitively in order to achieve their strategic objectives. They must engage in a new perspective, now also including third parties motivations and movements in the ecosystem, besides their own business viewpoint. Inspired on properties of natural and business ecosystems, SECO covers technical and business aspects of software development as well as partnership among companies. In this paper, we undertake a review on SECOs status as an emerging research topic in SE community. We map what is currently known about SECOs and also analyze them in a three-dimensional perspective in SE, i.e., technical, business and social. We observed that SECOs research is concentrated in eight main areas in which the most relevant ones are open source software, ecosystem modeling, and business issues. This paper also contributes to summarize the body of knowledge and presents a research agenda in SECOs.