A framework for analysing and visualising open source software ecosystems

Abstract

Nowadays, most empirical studies in open source software evolution are based on the analysis of program code alone. In order to get a better understanding of how software evolves over time, many more entities that are part of the software ecosystem need to be taken into account. We present a general framework to automate the analysis of the evolution of software ecosystems. The framework incorporates a database that stores all relevant information obtained thanks to several mining tools, and provides a unified data source to visualisation tools. One such visualisation tool is integrated in order to get a first quick overview of the evolution of different aspects of the software project under study. The framework is extensible in order to accommodate more and different types of input and output, depending on the needs of the user. We compare our framework against existing solutions, and show how we can use this framework for carrying out concrete ecosystem evolution experiments.