Scalability of Ecosystem Architectures

The goal of this research is to understand the various dimensions along which the architectures in an ecosystem should scale to support successful software-intensive products. We used a case study approach in which we first identified characteristics of scalability from the research literature and then examined ecosystems to determine the extent to which their primary architectures possessed these characteristics. We also examined the architectures of the platform extensions. We found that each architecture exhibited those characteristics although through different mechanisms and to different degrees.