On the Relations between Systems-of-Systems and Software Ecosystems

Rodrigo Santos

Cláudia Werner

Marcelo Gonçalves

Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

Outline

• Introduction

• SoS Overview

• SECO Overview

• SoS & SECO

• Final Considerations

Introduction

• Software has represented a crucial element for most of existing systems in global industry

• Due to tangled technical, business and social challenges, new interdisciplinary Software Engineering research has arisen – Software-intensive systems

– Systems-of-Systems (SoS)

– Software Ecosystems (SECO)

• We perform a preliminary discussion on SoS and SECO as related research topics, promoting opportunities for research

SoS Overview

• A class of software-intensive systems whose constituents are themselves complex, heterogeneous, independent, and large

• These systems are useful for several of society’s needs, such as healthcare, avionics, logistics, energy, and transportation

SoS Overview

• There is a set of consensual characteristics: – operational independence

– managerial independence

– evolutionary development

– emergent behavior

– geographical distribution

• SoS can assume different categories: – Virtual

– Collaborative

– Acknowledged

– Directed

SECO Overview

• Components, services, and applications have a direct relation with collaborators in promoting, distributing or selling products

• External and/or unknown developers are also contributing to evolve these systems, changing the traditional value chain

SECO Overview

• Technical challenges are reinforced in SECO, especially regarding architecture & reuse – stability

– simplicity

– security and reliability

– evolution

SoS & SECO

• Solutions for SECO/SoS are individually proposed by isolated teams in order to meet particular domain-oriented problems

• Some preliminary relations were identified:

1. Klein & McGregor (2013) amplified the concept of architecture to the

so-called SoS platform, or industry platform

From the SECO viewpoint, an SoS platform can exist in an environment of different levels of actors, artifacts, and relationships

Integration and communication are crucial, since they are software-intensive systems

SoS & SECO

• Solutions for SECO/SoS are individually proposed by isolated teams in order to meet particular domain-oriented problems

• Some preliminary relations were identified:

2. SoS concept started to gain its popularity mainly in military domain as a

strategy for reaching goals

SECO concept is popular in software business platforms and open source software (OSS) domains (Manikas & Hansen, 2013)

SECO can be seen as an application domain for SoS as such (Kazman et al., 2012; Klein & McGregor, 2013; Axelsson et al., 2014).

SoS & SECO

• Solutions for SECO/SoS are individually proposed by isolated teams in order to meet particular domain-oriented problems

• Some preliminary relations were identified:

3. Concepts of virtual and collaborative SoS have been explored in the

SECO context

It allows collaboration of different constituent systems and organizations in order to produce emergent functionalities (Klein & Vliet, 2013)

SECO are more valuable because in these categories there is no strict control over the constituent systems

SoS & SECO

• We have preliminarily drawn some similarities between SoS characteristics and SECO technical challenges: – Based on (Maier, 1998) and (Bosch, 2010)

SoS SECO Relation

operational independence

architectural stability

software systems integration and CBD can be combined to support strategies to cope with API issues

platform evolution

evolutionary development

community’s emerging requirements/contributions, as well as the adjustments of hybrid business models

emergent behavior

security and reliability

system dynamics may be a useful instrument to simulate components configurations to improve architectural design

Final Considerations

• We intend to investigate: – how SECO platforms can benefit from SoS mindset

– how SoS can benefit from business and social networks

• We also intend to evaluate the interactions between SoS and SECO in order to more clearly state differences and similarities – systematic mapping study

• Concrete implications for DSD will be investigated, since one of the SoS/SECO features is the potentially distributed nature

On the Relations between Systems-of-Systems and Software Ecosystems

Rodrigo Santos

rps@cos.ufrj.br

Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

elisa@icmc.usp.br