A Grounded Theory of Cross-community SECOs: Feedback Diversity vs. Synchronization

Despite their proliferation, growing sustainable software ecosystems (SECOs) remains a substantial challenge. One approach to mitigate this challenge is by collecting and integrating feedback from distributors (distros) and end-users of the SECO releases into future SECO releases, tools, or policies. This paper performs a socio-technical analysis of cross-community collaboration in the OpenStack SECO, which consists of the upstream OpenStack project and 21 distribution (distro) communities. First, we followed Masood et al.’s adaptation of Strauss-Corbinian grounded theory methodology for socio-technical contexts on data from an open-ended unstructured interview, a survey, focus groups, and 384 mailing list threads to investigate how SECOs manage to sustain cross-community collaboration. Our theory has 15 constructs divided into four categories: diverse feedback types and mechanisms (2), characteristics of feedback (2), challenges (7), and the benefits (4) of cross-community collaboration. We then empirically study the salient aspects of the theory, i.e., diversity and synchronization, among 21 OpenStack distros. We empirically mined feedback that distros contribute to upstream, i.e., 140,261 mailing list threads, 142,914 bugs reported, 65,179 bugs resolved, and 4,349 new features. Then, we use influence maximization social network analysis to model the synchronization of feedback in the OpenStack SECO. Our results suggest that distros contribute substantially towards the sustainability of the SECO in the form of 25.6% of new features, 30.7% of emails, 44.3% of bug reports, and 30.7% of bug fixes. Finally, we found evidence of distros playing different roles in a SECO, with nine distros contributing all four types of feedback in equal proportions, while 12 distros specialize in one type of feedback. Distros that are influential in propagating a given type of feedback to the SECO community are not necessarily specialized in that feedback type.