Tom Mens – författare

The book starts with an introductory chapter that provides a historical account of the origins of software ecosystems. It provides the necessary context about the domain of software ecosystems by highlighting its different perspectives, definitions, and representations. It also exemplifies the variety of software ecosystems that have emerged during the previous decades. The remaining book is composed of five parts: Part I contains two chapters on software ecosystem representations, Part II two chapters that focus on complementary ways and techniques of analyzing software ecosystems. Next, Part III includes two chapters that focus on aspects related to the evolution within software ecosystems, while Part IV looks at workflow automation and infrastructure-as-code ecosystems. Finally, Part V focuses on ecosystems for software modeling and for data-intensive software.

This book is intended for researchers and practitioners interested in data mining, tooling, and empirical analysis of software ecosystems. The reader will appreciate chapters that cover a wide spectrum of social and technical aspects of software ecosystems, each including an overview of the state of the art.

Chapter 2 The Software Heritage Open Science Ecosystem is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Software has become omnipresent and vital in our information-based society, so all software producers should assume responsibility for its reliability. While "reliable" originally assumed implementations that were effective and mainly error-free, additional issues like adaptability and maintainability have gained equal importance recently. For example, the 2004 ACM/IEEE Software Engineering Curriculum Guidelines list software evolution as one of ten key areas of software engineering education.

Mens and Demeyer, both international authorities in the field of software evolution, together with the invited contributors, focus on novel trends in software evolution research and its relations with other emerging disciplines such as model-driven software engineering, service-oriented software development, and aspect-oriented software development. They do not restrict themselves to the evolution of source code but also address the evolution of other, equally important software artifacts such as databases and database schemas, design models, software architectures, and process management. The contributing authors provide broad overviews of related work, and they also contribute to a comprehensive glossary, a list of acronyms, and a list of books, journals, websites, standards and conferences that together represent the community’s body of knowledge.

Combining all these features, this book is the indispensable source for researchers and professionals looking for an introduction and comprehensive overview of the state of the art. In addition, it is an ideal basis for an advanced course on software evolution.

During the last few years, software evolution research has explored new domains such as the study of socio-technical aspects and collaboration between different individuals contributing to a software system, the use of search-based techniques and meta-heuristics, the mining of unstructured software repositories, the evolution of software requirements, and the dynamic adaptation of software systems at runtime. Also more and more attention is being paid to the evolution of collections of inter-related and inter-dependent software projects, be it in the form of web systems, software product families, software ecosystems or systems of systems.

With this book, the editors present insightful contributions on these and other domains currently being intensively explored, written by renowned researchers in the respective fields of software evolution. Each chapter presents the state of the art in a particular topic, as well as the current research, available tool support and remaining challenges. The book is complemented by a glossary of important terms used in the community, a reference list of nearly 1,000 papers and books and tips on additional resources that may be useful to the reader (reference books, journals, standards and major scientific events in the domain of software evolution and datasets).