Exploiting Repositories in Mobile Software Ecosystems from a Governance Perspective

摘要

Software organizations that maintain mobile platforms (e.g. Apple, Google, and Microsoft) open their infrastructure to attract and engage external developers to meet the demands of users. This scenario has been investigated as Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO). In MSECO, an organization provides content reuse repositories where users can search, download and evaluate apps, or where developers can get support materials. Such repositories are commonly inspired by reuse mechanisms and help an organization to control and evolve the whole ecosystem to keep it vibrant. In this scenario, it is important to understand how to govern MSECO as well as how reuse mechanisms can support this goal. As such, we investigated governance strategies that emerge from content reuse repositories based on four steps: (1) designing a governance process; (2) performing an initial evaluation of this process with managers who are experts in the main existing MSECO (Apple, Google, Nokia, Microsoft, and Samsung); (3) interviewing 18 MSECO managers to collect opinion about the process; and (4) conducting an exploratory analysis of the MSECO reuse repositories' structure based on the proposed governance process. Three types of content reuse repositories (Apps' Store, Developer's Central, and Apps' Management) were analyzed. As a result, this research allowed us to define a governance process from a repository perspective containing 11 activities.