Presentation at 8th Workshop on Distributed Software Development, Software Ecosystems and Systems-of-Systems - WDES 2014 Website: http://wdes2014.icmc.usp.br/Index_en Proceedings (per paper): http://www.lbd.dcc.ufmg.br/bdbcomp/servlet/Evento?id=787 Proceedings (volume): http://www.ic.ufal.br/evento/cbsoft2014/anais/wdes_v1_p.pdf

1. On the Relations between
Systems-of-Systems and Software Ecosystems
Rodrigo Santos
Cláudia Werner
Marcelo Gonçalves
Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

2. Outline
• Introduction
• SoS Overview
• SECO Overview
• SoS & SECO
• Final Considerations

3. Introduction
• Software has represented a crucial element for most of
existing systems in global industry
• Due to tangled technical, business and social challenges, new
interdisciplinary Software Engineering research has arisen
– Software-intensive systems
– Systems-of-Systems (SoS)
– Software Ecosystems (SECO)
• We perform a preliminary discussion on SoS and SECO as
related research topics, promoting opportunities for research

4. SoS Overview
• A class of software-intensive systems whose constituents are
themselves complex, heterogeneous, independent, and large
• These systems are useful for several of society’s needs, such
as healthcare, avionics, logistics, energy, and transportation

5. SoS Overview
• There is a set of consensual characteristics:
– operational independence
– managerial independence
– evolutionary development
– emergent behavior
– geographical distribution
• SoS can assume different categories:
– Virtual
– Collaborative
– Acknowledged
– Directed

6. SECO Overview
• Components, services, and applications have a direct relation
with collaborators in promoting, distributing or selling products
• External and/or unknown developers are also contributing to
evolve these systems, changing the traditional value chain

7. SECO Overview
• Technical challenges are
reinforced in SECO, especially
regarding architecture & reuse
– stability
– simplicity
– security and reliability
– evolution

8. SoS & SECO
• Solutions for SECO/SoS are individually proposed by isolated
teams in order to meet particular domain-oriented problems
• Some preliminary relations were identified:
1. Klein & McGregor (2013) amplified the concept of architecture to the
so-called SoS platform, or industry platform
From the SECO viewpoint, an SoS platform can exist in an environment of
different levels of actors, artifacts, and relationships
Integration and communication are crucial, since they are software-
intensive systems

9. SoS & SECO
• Solutions for SECO/SoS are individually proposed by isolated
teams in order to meet particular domain-oriented problems
• Some preliminary relations were identified:
2. SoS concept started to gain its popularity mainly in military domain as a
strategy for reaching goals
SECO concept is popular in software business platforms and open source
software (OSS) domains (Manikas & Hansen, 2013)
SECO can be seen as an application domain for SoS as such (Kazman et al.,
2012; Klein & McGregor, 2013; Axelsson et al., 2014).

10. SoS & SECO
• Solutions for SECO/SoS are individually proposed by isolated
teams in order to meet particular domain-oriented problems
• Some preliminary relations were identified:
3. Concepts of virtual and collaborative SoS have been explored in the
SECO context
It allows collaboration of different constituent systems and organizations in
order to produce emergent functionalities (Klein & Vliet, 2013)
SECO are more valuable because in these categories there is no strict
control over the constituent systems

11. SoS & SECO
• We have preliminarily drawn some similarities between SoS
characteristics and SECO technical challenges:
– Based on (Maier, 1998) and (Bosch, 2010)
SoS SECO Relation
operational
independence
architectural
stability
software systems integration and CBD can be combined to
support strategies to cope with API issues
platform
evolution
evolutionary
development
community’s emerging requirements/contributions, as well
as the adjustments of hybrid business models
emergent
behavior
security and
reliability
system dynamics may be a useful instrument to simulate
components configurations to improve architectural design

12. Final Considerations
• We intend to investigate:
– how SECO platforms can benefit from SoS mindset
– how SoS can benefit from business and social networks
• We also intend to evaluate the interactions between SoS and
SECO in order to more clearly state differences and similarities
– systematic mapping study
• Concrete implications for DSD will be investigated, since one
of the SoS/SECO features is the potentially distributed nature

13. On the Relations between
Systems-of-Systems and Software Ecosystems
Rodrigo Santos
rps@cos.ufrj.br
Elisa Yumi Nakagawa
elisa@icmc.usp.br