Beyond Software Families: Community-Driven Variability

Both software engineering researchers and practitioners have increasingly shifted their focus from single software systems to software families, reflecting the need for software industrialization through systematic reuse of implementation artifacts. Interestingly, several vibrant ecosystems produce software families in a radically different way than classical variability-intensive systems, notably software product lines. The Bitcoin community, for instance, evolves its ecosystem through openly shared improvement proposals being continuously shaped and autonomously implemented by independent actors. While this novel paradigm of community-driven variability (CDV) has proven effective for driving flourishing technologies like Bitcoin and others, it also comes with unique challenges calling for novel solutions. In this paper, we define the key characteristics of ecosystems exposing CDV, highlight the novel problems they face, and outline our respective research vision.