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Educating To Achieve Healthy Open Source Ecosystems: Simone Da Silva Amorim John D. Mcgregor
Educating To Achieve Healthy Open Source Ecosystems: Simone Da Silva Amorim John D. Mcgregor
Educating To Achieve Healthy Open Source Ecosystems: Simone Da Silva Amorim John D. Mcgregor
validity are presented in Section 7. Finally, Section 8 o�ers some natural inputs of innovation into new products and functions e�-
concluding remarks. ciently;and (iii) Niche Creation: the skill of creating an environment
receptive to diversity and new capabilities through integration and
2 RELATED WORK innovation.
Several studies have been conducted considering the barriers for Based on the Iansiti and Levien study, several authors have
newcomers in open source ecosystems [14, 16, 19]. Some of them studied the health of software ecosystems and created evaluation
suggest practices and training to educate these new developers methods[4]. Regarding the necessity of evaluating the health, we in-
[17, 20]; however, we did not �nd studies explicitly considering troduced the concept of Architectural Health of Software Ecosystems
the impact of these practices on the health of software ecosystems. in previous work[3]. This idea is based on the way in which the
Below, we brie�y review some studies that discuss the training of ecosystem creates and maintains the software architecture impact
newcomers and activities to achieve the health of ecosystems. directly on their performance indicators. This way, the architectural
First, considering the training of newcomers, Steinmacher et al. health represents the “weight” of the software architecture issues
introduced guidelines for the two faces of the system: OSS com- on the health of a ecosystem.
munities that desire to attract new developers and newcomers that Going further, we believe that the practices adopted to handle
desire to get involved in OSS communities [20]. The goal of these the software architecture impact directly on the health. So, we infer
guidelines is to help newcomers face the existing barriers to engag- that through evaluating the architectural practices it is possible to
ing in OSS projects, as well as to enhance the growth and diversity have a notion of the health state concerning architectural issues[3].
of OSS communities. Their results emphasize the need for OSS Moreover, regarding practices Jacobson et al. advocates that the use
communities to pay attention to socialization factors that retain of practices is more e�cient than using processes because they can
newcomers. de�ne and encompass di�erent ways of working [9]. Reinforcing the
In another work, Sarma et al. investigated the learning of new- belief that by assessing practices we can gather di�erent scenarios
comers in the BugExchange ecosystem. This ecosystem organizes related to ecosystem health.
tasks from OSS projects and helps train newcomers. The idea is In our previous study [3], we introduced that the architectural
to help newcomers to know how to begin making contributions health can be analyzed considering seven key areas that grouped
and/or how to choose appropriate tasks to develop. Through ade- practices in accordance with their purpose. These key areas are:
quate training, newcomers gain an understanding about the project (i) Architectural Knowledge (AK) - related to manage all learning
and can contribute to keeping the work organized. The information about the software architecture; (ii) External Management (EM) -
available about the ecosystem will provide the correct support for related to manage the interfaces third-party developers; (iii) Choice
deciding how to work e�ciently. of Technology (CH) - refers to choose the best technologies to attend
Finally, regarding the health of ecosystems, Wnuk et al. presented and support the ecosystem community; (iv) Resource Management
an exploratory case study about governance activities and how they (RM) - encompasses practices to manage tools, hardware, people, etc.
prevent or improve the health of ecosystems [21]. They evaluated required by the ecosystem; (v) Design-Making (DM) - encompasses
the governance model applied by the Application Development practices related to create and build the architecture to meet the
Partner (ADP) software ecosystem considering the degree to which functional requirements; (vi) Quality Management (QM) - refers
the ecosystem performed governance activities: performing no to manage the quality of the various structures designed into the
activities, performing a partial set of activities, and performing architecture; (vii) Changes Management (CM) - related to maintain
a full set of activities. Their outcomes showed the percentage of the changes and reduce the impact caused by the changes on the
activities executed, and these activities do not follow completely a software architecture.
governance model proposed by Jansen and Cusumano[11, 12]. We can envision that to achieve a healthy ecosystem it is neces-
These studies described training issues for newcomers in OSS sary the ecosystem organization to attract and train the developers
projects, and a model of evaluation of the health a�ecting gover- to adopt healthy architectural practices. This is particularly the case
nance activities. The studies provide di�erent perspectives that when these developers are newcomers, through adequate training
should be considered about the impact of the newcomer activities they could contribute to the ecosystem becoming more healthy.
on the health of the ecosystem. We use this work as the base for our
investigation about the training to achieve a healthy ecosystem. 4 METHODOLOGY
In this section, we introduce the main research objectives, the
3 ARCHITECTURAL HEALTH OF context in which the study was conducted, and the approach used
ECOSYSTEMS to investigate architectural practices in the literature and a real-
world ecosystem.
In 2012, Iansiti and Levien introduced a framework to evaluate
the health of a business ecosystem[8]. From the idea of biological
ecosystems, they created the framework to understand the behav- 4.1 Objectives
ior of large, loosely-connected networks. Focusing on operational Looking for growth and prosperity software ecosystems work to
characteristics of an entire ecosystem, they de�ned three health attract and keep new contributors. To facilitate the process of en-
indicators that represent the state of health of the ecosystem. They gagement, the organization adopts several architectural practices
are: (i) Robustness: the capability to handle disturbances while related with guidance and training for newcomers developers. The
staying alive over time; (ii) Productivity: the ability to transform goal of this study is to know how newcomers are accepted and
Educating to Achieve Healthy Open Source Ecosystems ECSAW’18, September 2018, Madrid, Spain
also trained to accomplish and maintain the health of an open Table 1: Research Studies about Newcomers
source ecosystem concerning architectural practices adopted by the
ecosystem organization. To perform this, we capture and analyze Identity Research Study
S1 Overcoming Open Source Project Entry Barriers with a Portal for
architectural practices that are used to facilitate the engagement of Newcomers[19]
newcomers. We also examine the in�uence of these practices on S2 Let me in: Guidelines for the Successful Onboarding of Newcomers
the health of these open source ecosystems. Based on this goal, we to Open Source Projects[20]
S3 Lessons Learned from Teaching Open Source Software
de�ned the two following research questions: Development[14]
S4 How Modern News Aggregators Help Development Communities
RQ1: What are the architectural practices that are focused Shape and Share Knowledge[1]
S5 Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free
on the engaging process in open source ecosystems? This re- Software Project[5]
search question is intended to identify architectural practices used S6 Newcomer Integration and Learning in Technical Support Com-
munities for Open Source Software[18]
for accepting and training newcomers about open source ecosys-
S7 Beyond Pretty Pictures: Examining the Bene�ts of Code Visualiza-
tems. tion for Open Source Newcomers[15]
establishes their appropriate way-of-working and their approach to could situate newcomers in the ecosystem context in�uencing niche
being pro�table, so newcomers arriving in this environment need to creation.
learn fast and �nd a way to contribute with minimal complications. This is an exploratory study intended to understand the impact
We observed that the 29 practices cover several aspects of the of the newcomers engagement process on the ecosystem health.
engagement process of a newcomer. However, in our collection of Taking consciousness actions to keep and achieve health should
practices we did not see practices directly related to explaining the come from everyone - beginners to experienced members. We did
alignment of business strategies to the technical architecture. So, the not determine how much e�ort is necessary to implement all these
beginner can have some di�culty in understanding the reasoning practices; however, newcomers who are well prepared overcome
behind decisions made by the ecosystem board. The existence of initial obstacles faster. As a result, they can keep the focus on
a short history, showing the last decisions and future directions, working and contributing to achieving a healthy state. Additional
studies are necessary to analyze architectural practices in detail as
ECSAW’18, September 2018, Madrid, Spain S. Amorim et al.
well as empirical studies to consolidate their connection with an [3] Simone da S. Amorim, John D. McGregor, Eduardo S. de Almeida, and Christina
software ecosystem’s health. von F. G. Chavez. 2017. Software Ecosystems’ Architectural Health: Another
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There are some threats to validity for our study. They are described de Almeida, and Christina von Flach Garcia Chavez. 2017. How Has the Health
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and detailed as follows: the 31st Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES ’17).
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[6] Oscar Franco-Bedoya, David Ameller, Dolors Costal, and Xavier Franch. 2014.
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- Incomplete list of practices: Another problem could be that the [9] I. Jacobson, P. W. Ng, and I. Spence. 2007. Enough of Processes – Let’s Do
list of architectural practices is incomplete. We can have forgotten Practices. Journal of Object Technology 6, 6 (2007), 41–66.
some relevant architectural practice. In order to minimize this prob- [10] Slinger Jansen. 2014. Measuring the health of open source software ecosystems:
Beyond the scope of project health. Information and Software Technology 56
lem, we collected practices from recent studies published providing (November 2014), 1508–1519. Issue 11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2014.04.
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- Interpretation of the architectural practices: In order to avoid any Edward Elgar Publishers.
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A Survey of Software Platforms and Business Network Governance. In Software
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[14] Becka Morgan and Carlos Jensen. 2014. Lessons Learned from Teaching Open
Achieving a healthy open source software ecosystem involves the Source Software Development. , 133-142 pages.
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the 5th IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding
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[19] Igor Steinmacher, Tayana Uchoa Conte, Christoph Treude, and Marco Aurélio
In this paper, we presented di�erent architectural practices rec- Gerosa. 2016. Overcoming Open Source Project Entry Barriers with a Portal for
ommended by literature to be part of newcomers training. Also, Newcomers.
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jden, and Hussan Munir. 2014. Evaluating the Governance Model of Hardware-
of these practices on health indicators. These results will contribute Dependent Software Ecosystems âĂŞ A Case Study of the Axis Ecosystem. In
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architectural health of software ecosystems based on practices [3].
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The contribution by �rst author Simone Amorim was partially
funded by DPGI-IFBA-Campus Salvador.
REFERENCES
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2018-04-28.