Developing Ecosystem-aware Tools

Tool developers frequently leverage data from software ecosystems to improve their tools. Unfortunately, every developer has to build his own infrastructure to analyse the software ecosystem. This means identifying the scope of the ecosystem, obtaining the source code, extracting, storing and updating the data and so on. We argue that many of these tasks can be automated, freeing the developer to focus only on how to extract the needed ecosystem data and how to present it to the developer. To support our claim, we developed a framework for developing ecosystem-aware tools, tools that leverage data from the software ecosystem. This framework automates all routine steps of the process and leaves the developer to specify what data to extract from the ecosystem, and how to use it. To illustrate how this framework can be used for development of real-world ecosystem-aware tools we created four such tools using this framework. These tools are implementations of innovative approaches that improve the developer experience and were chosen to be diverse so as to illustrate the flexibility and features of the framework which is meant to support the needs of a broad range ecosystem-aware tools. The tools are individually evaluated and shown to be an improvement on the standard techniques, further supporting the notion that incorporating ecosystem data into the development process can be beneficial.

2016

dissertation

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