Fatores críticos que afetam a saúde de ecossistemas de software

Abstract

The software industry has become crucial to the efficiency of organizations and has extended the direct and indirect benefits to professionals in several areas of knowledge. Software Ecosystems (SECO) play a critical role in this scenario, involve a number of external actors and are formed by systems, and business subsystems that interact in a specific market niche. These interactions can affect the health of an SECO and its harmonic form is sought by the centralizing actor, i.e. the central organization of SECO (keystone). In this work, a framework for the identification and monitoring of critical SECO factors by the centralizing actor is presented. The purpose of the approach is to facilitate the management of SECO health-related decisions by promoting means for monitoring critical factors (ecosystem characteristics) that may interfere with the health of SECO. The study considers the importance of the health of SECO for the centralizing actor. Thus, a case study was conducted and a framework was constructed so that the centralizing actor can raise critical factors and thus improve the health of SECO. Initially, a primary study was carried out in which questionnaires related to the identification of actors and critical factors involved were used that could interfere in the health of an SECO. This study provided an initial understanding of the relationships involved in a real SECO. After analyzing the initial results, a framework was included for measuring factors related more specifically to SECO resilience. Thus, a second application was performed, the second study. According to the results, it was possible to perform the survey of the indicators of the resilience factor by the centralizing actor using the proposed framework. The proposed framework provides a process for surveying critical SECO factors by the centralizing actor with SECO end-users, helping SECO core organizations with similar profiles to better manage the health-related decisions of their SECO supported by identification of critical factors.