Paper Info
Title
The Evolution of the R Software Ecosystem
Abstract
Software ecosystems form the heart of modern companies' collaboration strategies with end users, open source developers and other companies. An ecosystem consists of a core platform and a halo of user contributions that provide value to a company or project. In order to sustain the level and number of high-quality contributions, it is crucial for companies and contributors to understand how ecosystems tend to evolve and can be maintained successfully over time. As a first step, this paper explores the evolution characteristics of the statistical computing project GNU R, which is a successful, end-user programming ecosystem. We find that the ecosystem of user-contributed R packages has been growing steadily since R's conception, at a significantly faster rate than core packages, yet each individual package remains stable in size. We also identified differences in the way user-contributed and core packages are able to attract an active community of users.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/CSMR.2013.33
Software Maintenance and Reengineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
software engineering,software packages,user interfaces,GNU R statistical computing project,R software ecosystem,software evolution,user community,user contribution,user-contributed R package,Evolution,R,Software ecosystems
Systems engineering,Package development process,Software peer review,Computer science,Software as a service,Software project management,Software distribution,Software ecosystem,Software development,Social software engineering
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1534-5351
978-1-4673-5833-0
37
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.37
18
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Daniel M. Germán162537.22
Bram Adams279832.26
Ahmed E. Hassan35959287.68