A Sociotechnical Negotiation Mechanism to Support Component Markets in Software Ecosystems

Organizations have opened up their software platforms and reusable assets to others, including partners and third-party developers around the world, creating software ecosystems (SECOs). This perspective can contribute to minimize nontechnical barriers of software reuse in industry because it explores potential benefits from the relations among companies and stakeholders. An inhibitor is the complexity in defining value for reusable assets in a scenario where producers try to meet customers’ expectations, and vice-versa. In this paper, we present a value-based mechanism to support component negotiation and socialization processes in a reuse repository in the SECO context as an extension of the Brechó-EcoSys environment. Social resources were integrated into the mechanism in order to aid component negotiation. An evaluation of the negotiation mechanism was initially performed based on an analysis of its elements and functions against critical factors in the negotiation within a SECO, identified in a previous systematic literature review. In addition, an analysis of the social resources supporting the negotiation mechanism was performed against popular sociotechnical elements for SECOs, identified in a previous survey with experts in the field. Finally, the negotiation process and the potential support provided by sociotechnical resources were investigated through an observational study where participants were engaged in some tasks playing as consumer and producers using the sociotechnical negotiation mechanism at Brechó-EcoSys environment. We concluded that sociotechnical resources (e.g., forum and tag cloud) support component producers and consumers with useful information from the SECO community.