Towards A Dependency-Driven Taxonomy of Software Types

Context: The evidence on software health and ecosystems could be improved if there was a systematic way to identify the types of software for which empirical evidence applies. Results and guidelines on software health are unlikely to be globally applicable: the context and the domain where the evidence has been tested are more likely to influence the results on software maintenance and health. Objective: The objectives of this paper are (i) to discuss the implications of adopting a specific taxonomy of software types, and (ii) to define, where possible, dependencies or similarities between parts of the taxonomy. Method: We discuss bottom-up and top-down taxonomies, and we show how different taxonomies fare against each other. We also propose two case studies, based on software projects divided in categories and sub-categories. Results: We show that one taxonomy does not consistently represent another taxonomy's categories. We also show that it is possible to establish directional dependencies (e.g., 'larger than') between attributes of different categories, and sub-categories. Conclusion: This paper establishes the need of directional-driven dependencies between categories of software types, that have an immediate effect on their maintenance and their relative software health.