Investigating Conditioning Factors for Transparency in Software Ecosystems

Software Ecosystems (SECO) are a set of actors interacting with a distributed market centered on a common technological platform to develop products and services. In this context, transparency allows third-party developers to learn processes and elements that integrate the SECO platform. This non-functional requirement impacts the coordination of developers and the management of requirements that emerge in SECO. Although it is an essential requirement, there is still a lack of a roadmap on what constitutes transparency in SECO. Thus, this article aims to characterize conditioning factors for transparency in SECO. To do so, we conducted a systematic mapping study (SMS) and a field study to identify and analyze such factors. After investigating the literature, we selected 23 studies to analyze the state-of-the-art about transparency in SECO. Next, we conducted interviews with 16 software developers to characterize the importance of conditioning factors for transparency identified in their interaction with GitHub, a platform to support project-based ecosystems. As results, we obtained a comprehensive view of solutions, conditioning factors, processes, and concerns related to transparency in SECO, whose discussion is centered on three main topics: access to information, communication channels, and requirements engineering. We also present a conceptual framework that structures all the knowledge about transparency in SECO obtained in both studies. Regarding implications for academia and industry, researchers can find a conceptual framework to be used as a foundation for systematic approaches to understanding transparency in SECO. Practitioners can find solutions and conditioning factors that help them to adopt initiatives to contribute to the open flow of information in a SECO and, thus, attract and engage new actors to a common technological platform.