Maintenance Cost of Software Ecosystem Updates

Over the past decades, software domains have witnessed a trend towards faster software release cycles, an increase of software components, and their connectivity. Examples include products in Industry 4.0 domains such as health care, retail, or mobility, in which, technically, software components are connected to a software ecosystem. Faster release cycles and high connectivity make many software ecosystem updates an expensive, arduous, and risky maintenance task. This paper leverages software release metadata to quantify the maintenance cost of software ecosystem updates. In particular, the data is applied to model a software ecosystem graph and subsequent calculate its maintenance cost. To illustrate, the model is prototyped and evaluated in three Industry 4.0 use cases.