Social and technical evolution of software ecosystems: a case study of rails

Abstract

Software ecosystems evolve through an active community of developers who contribute to projects within the ecosystem. However, development teams change over time, suggesting a potential impact on the evolution of the technical parts of the ecosystem. The impact of such modifications has been studied by previous works, but only temporary changes have been investigated, while the long-term effect of permanent changes has yet to be explored. In this paper, we investigate the evolution of the ecosystem of Ruby on Rails in GitHub in terms of such temporary and permanent changes of the development team. We use three viewpoints of the Rails ecosystem evolution to discuss our preliminary findings: (1) the base project; (2) the forks; and (3) the entire ecosystem containing both base project and forks.