Evolving Software Ecosystems: The Role of Community Dynamics in Shaping Software Extensions

Abstract

As software ecosystems (SECOs) grow across domains, understanding how tools evolve and differentiate functionally is critical for innovation. This manuscript-based thesis explores the evolution of the software ecosystem and its influence on developers’ motivations to extend their software products in two ecosystems. In the first part, we focus on the evolution of open-source software by analyzing 6,983 GitHub Actions on GitHub Marketplace, revealing a widespread functional redundancy. A graph-based analysis of version histories and release patterns identifies early contributors and offers strategies to reduce duplication and align tools with emerging trends. In the second part, in collaboration with industry partners, we examined proprietary software products, focusing on functional maturity, in particular AI-related features in 116 patient-centric healthcare applications. We find that 86.21% of apps remain in early AI adoption stages, indicating limited advancement toward AI integration. Together, these studies introduce a generalizable, data-driven framework for analyzing functional evolution across domains.