The Social Side of Software Platform Ecosystems

Souza, Cleidson R. B. de; Filho, Fernando Figueira; Miranda, Müller; Ferreira, Renato; Singer, Leif

doi:10.1145/2858036.2858431

Cited by 24 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Drawing on examples established in the literature, we identified six tasks that reflect the activities that developers typically undertake [18], all of which present some form of security concern. We provided brief scenarios, and a selection of choices -some security focused, and some not.…”

Section: Study I: Security Rationales Across App Development Activitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Professional app developers' have moved towards smaller scales as well: solo or small scale developer teams constitute a further 36% of the demographic [42]. With little ability to delegate things these (often independent) developers do not know how to do -or do not want to do -they must tackle a number of activities and considerations [18], exemplified in Figure 1. What developers do during all these activities (and not just while writing code) -and the rationale underpinning their actions -may compromise or worsen the security of the resulting app.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What developers do during all these activities (and not just while writing code) -and the rationale underpinning their actions -may compromise or worsen the security of the resulting app. Figure 1: App development activities, with typical considerations developers run across, adapted from [18,38].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Schrödinger's security

Linden

Anthonysamy

Nuseibeh

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering

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Research has established the wide variety of security failures in mobile apps, their consequences, and how app developers introduce or exacerbate them. What is not well known is why developers do so-what is the rationale underpinning the decisions they make which eventually strengthen or weaken app security? This is all the more complicated in modern app development's increasingly diverse demographic: growing numbers of independent, solo, or small team developers who do not have the organizational structures and support that larger software development houses enjoy.Through two studies, we open the box on developer rationale, by performing a holistic analysis of the rationale underpinning various activities in which app developers engage when developing an app.The first study does so through a task-based study with app developers (N=44) incorporating six distinct tasks for which this developer demographic must take responsibility: setting up a development environment, reviewing code, seeking help, seeking testers, selecting an advertisement SDK, and software licensing. We found that, while on first glance in several activities participants seemed to prioritize security, only in the code task such prioritization was underpinned by a security rationale-indicating that development behavior perceived to be secure may only be an illusion until the box is opened on their rationale.The second study confirms these findings through a wider survey of app developers (N=274) investigating to what extent they find the activities of the task-based study to affect their app's security. In line with the task-based study, we found that developers perceived actively writing code and actively using external SDKs

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Section: Study I: Security Rationales Across App Development Activitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Schrödinger's security

Linden

Anthonysamy

Nuseibeh

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering

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“…For instance, in the Windows Phone MSECO, the official support site indicates two sources working as technical forums: MSDN Forums (internal) and Stack Overflow (external). As pointed out by Souza et al (2016), Q&A repositories as Stack Overflow support the interaction among developers from hybrid ecosystems (e.g. Android, iOS or Windows Phone, or simply WP, in this study).…”

Section: Mobile Software Ecosystemsmentioning

confidence: 79%

Supporting governance of mobile application developers from mining and analyzing technical questions in stack overflow

Fontão

Ábia

Wiese

et al. 2018

J Softw Eng Res Dev

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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...

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“…Esta pesquisa também contribuiu para esclarecer algumas lacunas identificadas na literatura [de Souza et al 2016], explorando a dimensão técnica de ECOS de forma a complementar o entendimento de elementos da dimensão social. Além disso, com a participação de desenvolvedores nas entrevistas, pode-se verificar como os fatores técnicos identificados no mapeamento sistemático da literatura afetam suas decisões.…”

Section: Conclusãounclassified

How do Technical Factors Affect Developers in Mobile Software Ecosystems

Steglich

Marczak

Santos

et al. 2019

Anais Do VII Workshop De Visualização, Evolução E Manutenção De Software (VEM 2019)

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The Software Evolution area brings applications to the Mobile era in which users want to use these applications on their mobile devices. A Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO) is the kind of ecosystems in which developers build applications to attend the needs of mobile technologies users (e.g., Android and iOS). Literature explains that the capability to attracting and retaining people (i.e., developers and users) is essencial to MSECO sustainability, i.e., to the MSECO survive along the years. In a previous work, we conducted a literature review that identified 6 factors that may influence developers to participate in an MSECO. In this study, we present a Field Study aiming to understand how these 6 identified factors may have influenced practitioners in real life projects.

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The Social Side of Software Platform Ecosystems

Cited by 24 publications

References 28 publications

Schrödinger's security

Schrödinger's security

Supporting governance of mobile application developers from mining and analyzing technical questions in stack overflow

How do Technical Factors Affect Developers in Mobile Software Ecosystems

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