It Takes an Ecosystem

The ecosystem within which a software product line resides is a complex network of organizations that produce and consume software assets together with linkages to various types of assets. The complexity of the relationships among the elements in the ecosystem requires analytic techniques to predict the effects of strategic decisions on the ecosystem. The STRategic Ecosystem Analysis Method (STREAM) provides the framework within which to create a model of an ecosystem and compute measures such as eigenvector centrality and robustness. This presentation introduces a novel analysis method that uses the architecture construct of a view to separate concerns and reduce the complexity of the model and illustrates its application to a specific organization. The method has been applied in several projects covering a diverse set of domains. The ecosystem models produced by STREAM have proven useful for supporting software product line practices such as building a business case, developing a concept of operations, scoping, and defining software architecture.