A case study on software ecosystem characteristics in industrial automation software

Abstract

In software ecosystems (SECOs) both internal and external developers build software solutions for specific market segments based on common technological platforms. Despite a significant body of research on SECOs there is still a need to empirically investigate the characteristics of SECOs in specific industrial environments to understand and improve development processes. In particular, when defining software processes understanding the roles of the participants in the SECO is crucial. This paper thus reports results of an exploratory case study in the industrial automation domain. We explore two research questions on SECO characteristics and discuss research issues we derived from our analyses. While our study confirms key SECO characteristics reported in the literature we also identify additional properties relevant for development processes in the domain of industrial automation.