There is a need to improve the direct communication between large organizations that maintain mobile platforms (e.g. Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and third-party developers to solve technical questions that emerge during the project and development of developers' contributions in a Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO). In this context, those organizations may not know how to define and evolve strategies to govern their developers towards achieving their organizational goals. Such organizations use an infrastructure to support developers, for example, questions and answers (Q&A) portals such as Stack Overflow. Interactions among developers in these portals feed a Q&A repository that can serve as a mechanism to understand and define strategies to support developers. In this paper, we mined 1,568,377 technical questions from Stack Overflow related to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone platforms. Next, we performed comparisons among those MSECO regarding: (i) developers' activity intensity, (ii) hot-topics (using Latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm) from all and more commented/viewed questions, (iii) "What" and "How to" questions, (iv) hot-topics from more viewed unanswered questions, and (v) relationship among questions and official developer events. From the results, we identified four key insights: recruiting, educating, and monitoring strategies; barrier reduction; management of technology insertion; and fostering of relationships. The relevance of the four key insights to support developer governance was evaluated by practitioners through a survey. Finally, for each key insight we associated a total of 10 strategies to support developer governance activities. Such strategies were extracted from 65 studies identified through a systematic mapping of the literature.
IntroductionIn Software Engineering, the relationship among mobile application developers and an organization responsible for a technological platform (keystone) which involves cooperation and competition has been investigated as a Software Ecosystem (SECO) (Bosch, 2009). In the mobile application (app) scenario, this context refers to a specific type of SECO, known as Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO) (Lin & Ye, 2009;Fontão et al., 2015). The developer is an essential actor to sustain MSECO contributions, such as apps and technical documentation (Fontão et al., 2016;Koch & Kerschbaum, 2014). Such contributions are usually stored in an official, internal MSECO repository, such as Android 1 and Apple 2 Developers repositories. Moreover, there are links between MSECO and external repositories, such as code (e.g. GitHub) (Casalnuovo et al., 2015) and questions and answers (Q&A) repositories. As an example of an external Q&A repository, Stack Overflow has a set of technical questions/answers that arise from the use of APIs, SDKs, and development tools (Ahmad et al., 2018). Such external repositories help to maintain the interaction among developers over a common platform, resulting in a set of contributions and influencing directly or indirectly the...
