A Technology-Neutral Role-Based Collaboration Model for Software Ecosystems

In large-scale software ecosystems, many developers contribute extensions to a common software platform. Due to the independent development efforts and the lack of a central steering mechanism, similar functionality may be developed multiple times by different developers. We tackle this problem by contributing a role-based collaboration model for software ecosystems to make such implicit similarities explicit and to raise awareness among developers during their ongoing efforts. We extract this model based on realization artifacts in a specific programming language located in a particular source code repository and present it in a technology-neutral way. We capture five essential collaborations as independent role models that may be composed to present developer collaborations of a software ecosystem in their entirety, which fosters overview of the software ecosystem, analyses of duplicated development efforts and information of ongoing development efforts. Finally, using the collaborations defined in the formalism we model real artifacts from Marlin, a firmware for 3D printers, and we show that for the selected scenarios, the five collaborations were sufficient to raise awareness and make implicit information explicit.