An Ecosystemic and Socio-Technical View on Software Maintenance and Evolution

In this invited paper I focus on the difficulties of maintaining and evolving software systems that are part of a larger ecosystem. While not every software system falls under this category, software ecosystems are becoming ubiquitous due to the omnipresence of open source software. I present several challenges that arise during maintenance and evolution of software ecosystems, and I argue how some of these challenges should be addressed by adopting a socio-technical view and by relying on a multidisciplinary and mixed methods research approach. My arguments are accompanied by an extensive, though unavoidably incomplete, set of references to the state-of-the-art research in this domain.