A Process to Analyze Software Ecosystem Social Dimension Through a Collaboration Perspective

Development communities and the software industry increasingly adopt the Software Ecosystems approach (SECO). This approach can provide advantages but add additional complexity to resource management, affecting the software supply network. Observing SECOs, we can see through three dimensions: business, technical, and social. The social dimension focuses on stakeholders and how they interact with other dimensions. This paper presents a process for analyzing the social dimension of Software Ecosystems, supported by Complex Networks metrics, which allow the presentation of existing SECO relationships’ through visualizations and the use of complex networks. A preliminary evaluation with real data was carried out. The results point to the solution’s viability.