Quality assurance in software ecosystems: A systematic literature mapping and research agenda

• The literature on quality assurance in software ecosystems was reviewed.
• The resulting six publications were mapped to software lifecycle processes.
• A research agenda for quality assurance in software ecosystems was derived.
• A challenge is the cross-organizational interactions needed for quality assurance.
• Many issues are caused by the user initiated and dynamic system integration.

Software ecosystems are becoming a common model for software development in which different actors cooperate around a shared platform. However, it is not clear what the implications are on software quality when moving from a traditional approach to an ecosystem, and this is becoming increasingly important as ecosystems emerge in critical domains such as embedded applications. Therefore, this paper investigates the challenges related to quality assurance in software ecosystems, and identifies what approaches have been proposed in the literature. The research method used is a systematic literature mapping, which however only resulted in a small set of six papers. The literature findings are complemented with a constructive approach where areas are identified that merit further research, resulting in a set of research topics that form a research agenda for quality assurance in software ecosystems. The agenda spans the entire system life-cycle, and focuses on challenges particular to an ecosystem setting, which are mainly the results of the interactions across organizational borders, and the dynamic system integration being controlled by the users.