Telling stories about GNOME with Complicity

Abstract

Traditionally, the target of software evolution research has been single software systems. However, in the recent years, researchers observed that software systems are often not developed in isolation, but within a larger context: the ecosystem level. Analyzing software evolution at the ecosystem level allows a better understanding of the evolution phenomenon, as the entire development context can be studied. Nonetheless, software ecosystem analysis is challenging because of the sheer amount of data to be processed and understood. We present Complicity, a web-based application that supports software ecosystem analysis by means of interactive visualizations. Complicity breaks down the data quantity by offering two abstraction levels: ecosystem and entity. To support a thorough exploration and analysis of ecosystem data, the tool provides a number of fixed viewpoints and the possibility of creating new viewpoints with given software metrics. We illustrate in a case study how Complicity can help to understand the GNOME ecosystem in a bottom-up approach, starting from a single project and contributor towards their impact on the ecosystem.