Sami Hyrynsalmi
Marko Seppänen
ABSTRACT
The software ecosystem has become a central conceptualisation for characterising the contemporary software business world. To understand and evaluate ecosystems, the concept of 'ecosystem health' was borrowed from the field of biology. In a 'healthy' ecosystem, the participants will flourish and, vice versa, suffer in an unhealthy one. Yet, there is a lack of empirical validations for the current approach as well as certain limitations regarding the concept. This paper will present a critique on current ecosystem health measurement and evaluation approaches. In addition, there is discussion on three proposals that could help to refocus the academic research on software ecosystem health.
- Daniel Alami, María Rodríguez, and Slinger Jansen. 2015. Relating Health to Platform Success: Exploring Three E-commerce Ecosystems. In Proceedings of the 2015 European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops (ECSAW '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 43, 6 pages. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Rahul C. Basole and Jürgen Karla. 2011. On the Evolution of Mobile Platform Ecosystem Structure and Strategy. Business & Information Systems Engineering 3 (2011), 313--322. Issue 5.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Eric D. Beinhocker. 2006. The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics (1st ed.). Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, USA.Google Scholar
- Amel Ben Hadj Salem Mhamdia. 2013. Performance measurement practices in software ecosystem. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management 62, 5 (2013), 514--533.Google ScholarCross Ref
- R. Bhamra, S. Dani, and K. Burnard. 2011. Resilience: the concept, a literature review and future directions. International Journal of Production Research 40 (2011), 2111--2136. Issue 8.Google Scholar
- Jan Bosch. 2009. From software product lines to software ecosystems. In Proceedings of the 13th International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC '09). Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 111--119. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1753235.1753251 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Harry Bouwman, Christer Carlsson, Joanna Carlsson, Shahrokh Nikou, Anna Sell, and Pirkko Walden. 2014. How Nokia failed to nail the Smartphone market. In 25th European Regional Conference of the International Telecommunications Society (ITS), Brussels, Belgium, 22--25 June 2014. International Telecommunications Society (ITS), Brussels, 18.Google Scholar
- Matthieu Caneill, Daniel M. Germán, and Stefano Zacchiroli. 2017. The Deb-sources Dataset: two decades of free and open source software. Empirical Software Engineering 22, 3 (01 Jun 2017), 1405--1437. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. T. da Silva, F. L. Gustavo, E. D. Audacio, and E. C. Genvigir. 2017. Identifying Actors to Support Software Ecosystem Health. In 2017 IEEE/ACM Joint 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Systems-of-Systems and 11th Workshop on Distributed Software Development, Software Ecosystems and Systems-of-Systems (JSOS). IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 76--77. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Simone da Silva Amorim, John D. McGregor, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, and Christina von Flach Garcia Chavez. 2017. Understanding the Effects of Practices on KDE Ecosystem Health. In Open Source Systems: Towards Robust Practices 13th International Conference on Open Source Systems, Vol. 496. Springer, 89--100.Google Scholar
- Simone da Silva Amorim, Félix Simas S. Neto, John D. McGregor, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, and Christina von Flach G. Chavez. 2017. How Has the Health of Software Ecosystems Been Evaluated?: A Systematic Review. In Proceedings of the 31st Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES'17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 14--23. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Erik den Hartigh, Michiel Tol, and Wouter Visscher. 2006. The Health Measurement of a Business Ecosystem. In Proceedings of the ECCON 2006 Annual Meeting: "Organisations as Chaordic Panarchies" --- Towards Self-Transcending Work Holarchies, Frans M. van Eijnatten (Ed.). European Network on Chaos and Complexity Research and Management Practice, European Network on Chaos and Complexity Research and Management Practice, Bergen aan Zee, The Netherlands, 1--39.Google Scholar
- Erik den Hartigh, Wouter Visscher, Michiel Tol, and Adolfo Jiménez Salas. 2013. Measuring the health of a business ecosystem. In Software Ecosystems: Analyzing and Managing Business Networks in the Software Industry, Slinger Jansen, Sjaak Brinkkemper, and Michael A. Cusumano (Eds.). Edward Elgar Publisher Inc., Northampton, MA, USA, Chapter 11, 221--246.Google Scholar
- Chris Edwards. 2009. iMgonnagetrich {Comms Mobile Apps}. Engineering Technology 4, 16 (September 2009), 70--71. http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2009/16/imgonnagetrich.cfmGoogle Scholar
- Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, Gregorio Robles, Martin Michlmayr, Juan José Amor, and Daniel M. German. 2009. Macro-level software evolution: a case study of a large software compilation. Empirical Software Engineering 14, 3 (01 Jun 2009), 262--285. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G. Hamel and L. Valikangas. 2003. The quest for resilience. Harvard business review (2003).Google Scholar
- Sami Hyrynsalmi. 2014. Letters from the War of Ecosystems --- An Analysis of Independent Software Vendors in Mobile Application Marketplaces. Doctoral dissertation. University of Turku, Turku, Finland. TUCS Dissertations No 188.Google Scholar
- Sami Hyrynsalmi. 2016. To Redefine Ecosystem Health, or not to Redefine? A view of scientific knowledge on the "software ecosystem health" concept. In Proceedings of the European Workshop on Software Ecosystems 2015, Karl Michael Popp, Peter Buxmann, Thomas Aidan Curran, Gerald Eichler, Slinger Jansen, and Thomas Kude (Eds.). Synomic Academy, Books on Demand, 47--51.Google Scholar
- Sami Hyrynsalmi and Peri Linna. 2017. The Role of Applications and their Vendors in Evolution of Software Ecosystems. In 40th International Convention on Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics, MIPRO 2017, Opatija, Croatia, May 22--26, 2017, Petar Biljanovic, Marko Koricic, Karolj Skala, Tihana Galinac Grbac, Marina Cicin-Sain, Vlado Sruk, Slobodan Ribaric, Stjepan Gros, Boris Vrdoljak, Mladen Mauher, Edvard Tijan, and Filip Hormot (Eds.). IEEE, 1442--1447.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sami Hyrynsalmi, Matti Mäntymäki, and Aaron W. Baur. 2017. Multi-homing and Software Firm Performance: Towards a research agenda. In Digital Nations - Smart Cities, Innovation, and Sustainability: 16th IFIP WG 6.11 Conference on e-Business, e-Services, and e-Society, I3E 2017, Delhi, India, November 21--23, 2017, Proceedings (Theoretical Computer Science and General Issues), Arpan Kumar Kar, P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan, M.P. Gupta, Yogesh K. Dwivedi, Matti Mäntymäki, Marijn Janssen, Antonis Simintiras, and Salah Al-Sharhan (Eds.), Vol. 10595. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 442--452.Google Scholar
- Sami Hyrynsalmi, Marko Seppänen, Tiina Nokkala, Arho Suominen, and Antero Järvi. 2015. Wealthy, Healthy and/or Happy --- What does 'Ecosystem Health' Stand for?. In Software Business --- 6th International Conference, ICSOB 2015, Braga, Portugal, June 10--12, 2015, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing), M. João Fernandes, Ricardo J. Machado, and Krzysztof Wnuk (Eds.), Vol. 210. Springer International Publishing, 272--287.Google Scholar
- Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien. 2004. The Keystone Advantage: What the New Dynamics of Business Ecosystems Mean for Strategy, Innovation, and Sustainability. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, USA.Google Scholar
- Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien. 2004. Strategy as Ecology. Harvard Business Review 82, 3 (March 2004), 68--78.Google Scholar
- Marco Iansiti and Gregory L. Richards. 2006. The information technology ecosystem: Structure, health, and performance. The Antitrust Bulletin 51, 1 (Spring 2006), 77--110.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Slinger Jansen. 2014. Measuring the Health of Open Source Software Ecosystems: Moving Beyond the Project Scope. Information and Software Technology 56, 11 (November 2014), 1508--1519. Special issue on Software Ecosystems.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Slinger Jansen and Ewoud Bloemendal. 2013. Defining App Stores: The Role of Curated Marketplaces in Software Ecosystems. In Software Business. From Physical Products to Software Services and Solutions (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing), Georg Herzwurm and Tiziana Margaria (Eds.), Vol. 150. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Germany, 195--206.Google Scholar
- Slinger Jansen, Sjaak Brinkkemper, and Michael A. Cusumano (Eds.). 2013. Software Ecosystems: Analyzing and Managing Business Networks in the Software Industry. Edward Elgar Publisher Inc., Northampton, MA, USA. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Slinger Jansen, Sjaak Brinkkemper, and Anthony Finkelstein. 2009. Business Network Management as a Survival Strategy: A Tale of Two Software Ecosystems. In Proceedings of the first International Workshop on Software Ecosystems (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), Slinger Jansen, Sjaak Brinkkemper, Anthony Finkelstein, and Jan Bosch (Eds.), Vol. 505. CEUR-WS, 34--48. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-505/iwseco09-5JansenBrinkkemperFinkelstein.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Slinger Jansen, Anthony Finkelstein, and Sjaak Brinkkemper. 2009. A sense of community: A research agenda for software ecosystems. In 31st International Conference on Software Engineering --- Companion Volume, ICSE-Companion 2009. IEEE, 187--190.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Xiaobin Jin, Ying Long, Wei Sun, Yuying Lu, Xuhong Yang, and Jingxian Tang. 2017. Evaluating cities' vitality and identifying ghost cities in China with emerging geographical data. Cities 63 (2017), 98 -- 109.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jani Koskinen. 2010. Phenomenological view of health and patient empowerment with Personal Health Record. In Navigating the Fragmented Innovation Landscape: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Wellbeing in the Information Society (WIS 2010) (TUCS General Publications), Reima Suomi and Ilkka Iveskoksi (Eds.), Vol. 56. Turku Centre for Computer Science, Turku, Finland, 111--122.Google Scholar
- Xiaoping Li, Xiaowen Jie, Qiang Li, and Qi Zhang. 2013. Research on the Evaluation of Business Ecosystem Health. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management (Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering), Jiuping Xu, Masoom Yasinzai, and Benjamin Lev (Eds.), Vol. 185. Springer London, London, UK, 1009--1020.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Garm Lucassen, Kevin Rooij, and Slinger Jansen. 2013. Ecosystem Health of Cloud PaaS Providers. In Software Business. From Physical Products to Software Services and Solutions --- 4th International Conference, ICSOB 2013, Potsdam, Germany, June 11--14, 2013. Proceedings, Georg Herzwurm and Tiziana Margaria (Eds.). Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Vol. 150. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Germany, 183--194.Google Scholar
- Mircea F. Lungu. 2009. Reverse Engineering Software Ecosystems. Doctoral dissertation. Faculty of Informatics of the University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland.Google Scholar
- Konstantinos Manikas. 2016. Revisiting software ecosystems research: A longitudinal literature study. Journal of Systems and Software 117 (July 2016), 84--103. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Konstantinos Manikas and Klaus Marius Hansen. 2013. Reviewing the Health of Software Ecosystems --- A Conceptual Framework Proposal. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Software Ecosystems (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), Carina F. Alves, Geir K. Hanssen, Jan Bosch, and Slinger Jansen (Eds.), Vol. 987. CEUR-WS, Potsdam, Germany, 33--44. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-987/3.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Konstantinos Manikas and Klaus Marius Hansen. 2013. Software ecosystems --- A systematic literature review. Journal of Systems and Software 86, 5 (May 2013), 1294--1306. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Konstantinos Manikas and Dimosthenis Kontogiorgos. 2015. Characterizing Software Activity: The Influence of Software to Ecosystem Health. In Proceedings of the 2015 European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops (ECSAW '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 46, 6 pages. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Matti Mäntymäki and Hannu Salmela. 2017. In Search for the Core of the Business Ecosystem Concept: A Conceptual Comparison of Business Ecosystem, Industry, Cluster, and Inter Organizational Network. In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Software Ecosystems (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), Sami Hyrynsalmi, Arho Suominen, Christopher Jud, and Jan Bosch (Eds.), Vol. 2053. CEUR-WS, Aachen, Germany, 103--113.Google Scholar
- David G. Messerschmitt and Clemens Szyperski. 2003. Software Ecosystem: Understanding an Indispensable Technology and Industry. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA. Google ScholarDigital Library
- James F. Moore. 1993. Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition. Harvard Business Review 71, 3 (May-June 1993), 75--86.Google Scholar
- James F. Moore. 1996. The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems. Harper Business, New York, NY, USA.Google Scholar
- Marc Oriol, Oscar Franco-Bedoya, Xavier Franch, and Jordi Marco. 2014. Assessing open source communities' health using Service Oriented Computing concepts. In 2014 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS). 1--6.Google ScholarCross Ref
- David Rapport, Anthony McMichael, and Robert Costanza. 1999. Reply from D.J. Rapport, A.J. McMichael and R. Costanza. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 14, 2 (1999), 69--70.Google ScholarCross Ref
- David J. Rapport. 1992. Evaluating ecosystem health. Journal of Aquatic Ecosystem Health 1, 1 (1992), 15--24.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Maria Ivanilse Calderon Ribeiro and Arilo Cláudio Dias-Neto. 2017. Company Health in Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO): Research Perspectives and Challenges. In Proceedings of the Joint 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Systems-of-Systems and 11th Workshop on Distributed Software Development, Software Ecosystems and Systems-of-Systems (JSOS '17). IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 74--75. Google ScholarDigital Library
- David J. Schaeffer, Edwin E. Herricks, and Harold W. Kerster. 1988. Ecosystem health: I. Measuring ecosystem health. Environmental Management 12, 4 (July 1988), 445--455.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Israel Scheffler. 2010. In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions: And Other Essays in the Philosophy of Education (1st ed.). Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc., London, UK.Google Scholar
- Marko Seppänen, Sami Hyrynsalmi, Konstantinos Manikas, and Arho Suominen. 2017. Yet another ecosystem literature review: 10 + 1 research communities. In 2017 IEEE European Technology and Engineering Management Summit (E-TEMS) (E-TEMS 2017). IEEE, 1--8.Google Scholar
- Chetan Sharma. 2010. Sizing up the Global Mobile Apps Market. Industry Study Commissioned by Getjar. (March 2010).Google Scholar
- Lamia Soussi, Zeena Spijkerman, and Slinger Jansen. 2016. A Case Study of the Health of an Augmented Reality Software Ecosystem: Vuforia. In Software Business, Andrey Maglyas and Anna-Lena Lamprecht (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 145--152.Google Scholar
- Richard M. Stallman. 2010. Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (second ed.). Free Software Foundation, Inc., Boston, MA, USA. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Koen van Baarsen, Slinger Jansen, and Sergio Espana. 2017. Measuring Tool and Resource Maturity in Developer Ecosystems. In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Software Ecosystems (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), Sami Hyrynsalmi, Arho Suominen, Christopher Jud, and Jan Bosch (Eds.), Vol. 2053. CEUR-WS, Aachen, Germany, 88--102.Google Scholar
- Sonny van Lingen, Adrien Palomba, and Garm Lucassen. 2013. On the Software Ecosystem Health of Open Source Content Management Systems. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Software Ecosystems (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), Carina F. Alves, Geir K. Hanssen, Jan Bosch, and Slinger Jansen (Eds.), Vol. 987. CEUR-WS, Potsdam, Germany, 45--56. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-987/4.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Paul van Vulpen, Abel Menkveld, and Slinger Jansen. 2017. Health Measurement of Data-Scarce Software Ecosystems: A Case Study of Apple's ResearchKit. In Software Business, Arto Ojala, Helena Holmström Olsson, and Karl Werder (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 131--145.Google Scholar
- H. W. Volberda and A. Y. Lewin. 2003. Co-evolutionary dynamics within and between firms: From evolution to co-evolution. Journal of management studies 49 (2003), 5375--5393. Issue 18.Google Scholar
- Joel West and Michael Mace. 2010. Browsing as the killer app: Explaining the rapid success of Apple's iPhone. Telecommunications Policy 34, 5--6 (June 2010), 270--286. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Healthy until otherwise proven: some proposals for renewing research of software ecosystem health
Recommendations
Is Ecosystem Health a Useful Metaphor? Towards a Research Agenda for Ecosystem Health Research
Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital EraAbstractThe term ecosystem has been widely adopted outside its original domain in biology, for example in business and engineering studies. Ecosystem health is a derivative metaphor used to describe the success of the ecosystem. In this paper, we ...
Thinking otherwise: Ethics, technology and other subjects
Ethics is ordinarily understood as being concerned with questions of responsibility for and in the face of an other. This other is more often than not conceived of as another human being and, as such, necessarily excludes others --- most notably animals ...
Software ecosystems' architectural health: another view
JSOS '17: Proceedings of the Joint 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Systems-of-Systems and 11th Workshop on Distributed Software Development, Software Ecosystems and Systems-of-SystemsNowadays the software ecosystem health has received increasing attention as an important field for managing software ecosystems. Researchers have intensified studies in this area with the goal of assessing ecosystem health and possible causes for the ...
Comments