Guiding Development Work Across a Software Ecosystem by Visualizing Usage Data

TL;DR

This paper presents the Scientific Software Network Map, a visualization tool that displays summarized usage data to help stakeholders in scientific software ecosystems make informed development decisions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel tool for visualizing usage data tailored to software ecosystems, aiding in development and coordination efforts.

Findings

Ecosystem actors focus on maximizing diversity of use rather than quantity.

Summarized usage data helps justify ecosystem work to funders.

Granular usage needs can inform feature addition and maintenance.

Abstract

Software is increasingly produced in the form of ecosystems, collections of interdependent components maintained by a distributed community. These ecosystems act as network organizations, not markets, and thus often lack actionable price-like signals about how the software is used and what impact it has. We introduce a tool, the Scientific Software Network Map, that collects and displays summarized usage data tailored to the needs of actors in software ecosystems. We performed a contextualized walkthrough of the Map with producers and stewards in six scientific software ecosystems that use the R language. We found that they work to maximize diversity rather than quantity of uses, and to minimize coordination costs. We also found that summarized usage data would be useful for justifying ecosystem work to funding agencies; and we discovered a variety of more granular usage needs that would help in adding or maintaining features.