The relevance of application domains in empirical findings

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Capiluppi, A and Ajienka, N ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8792-282X, 2019. The relevance of application domains in empirical findings. In: Proceedings of ICSE 2019 (SoHeal). Piscataway, NJ, United States: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). ISBN 9781728134413

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Abstract

The term 'software ecosystem' refers to a collection of software systems that are related in some way. Researchers have been using different levels of aggregation to define an ecosystem: grouping them by a common named project (e.g., the Apache ecosystem); or considering all the projects contained in online repositories (e.g., the GoogleCode ecosystem). In this paper we propose a definition of ecosystem based on application domains: software systems are in the same ecosystem if they share the same application domain, as described by a similar technological scope, context or objective. As an example, all projects implementing networking capabilities to trade Bitcoin and other virtual currencies can be considered as part of the same "cryp-tocurrency" ecosystem. Utilising a sample of 100 Java software systems, we derive their application domains using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach. We then evaluate a suite of object-oriented metrics per ecosystem, and test a null hypothesis: 'the OO metrics of all ecosystems come from the same population'. Our results show that the null hypothesis is rejected for most of the metrics chosen: the ecosystems that we extracted, based on application domains, show different structural properties. From the point of view of the interested stakeholders, this could mean that the health of a software system depends on domain-dependent factors, that could be common to the projects in the same domain-based ecosystem.

Item Type:	Chapter in book
Description:	Paper presented at SoHeal 2019: 2nd International Workshop on Software Health (co-located with ICSE 2019), Montreal, Canada, 28 May 2019.
Creators:	Capiluppi, A. and Ajienka, N.
Publisher:	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Place of Publication:	Piscataway, NJ, United States
Date:	2019
ISBN:	9781728134413
Identifiers:	Number Type 1292521 Other
Divisions:	Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	24 Mar 2020 11:23
Last Modified:	24 Mar 2020 11:23
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/39456