Guiding Development Work Across a Software Ecosystem by Visualizing Usage Data
This work addresses the lack of actionable usage signals for producers and stewards in scientific software ecosystems, helping them justify work to funding agencies and guide feature development.
This paper introduces the Scientific Software Network Map, a tool that collects and displays summarized usage data for software ecosystems. Through a contextualized walkthrough with producers and stewards in six R language scientific software ecosystems, it was found that they prioritize diversity of uses and minimizing coordination costs, and that this data would be valuable for justifying funding and guiding feature development.
Software is increasingly produced in the form of ecosystems, collections of interdependent components maintained by a distributed community. These ecosystems act as network organizations, not markets, and thus often lack actionable price-like signals about how the software is used and what impact it has. We introduce a tool, the Scientific Software Network Map, that collects and displays summarized usage data tailored to the needs of actors in software ecosystems. We performed a contextualized walkthrough of the Map with producers and stewards in six scientific software ecosystems that use the R language. We found that they work to maximize diversity rather than quantity of uses, and to minimize coordination costs. We also found that summarized usage data would be useful for justifying ecosystem work to funding agencies; and we discovered a variety of more granular usage needs that would help in adding or maintaining features.