Reference Coupling: An Exploration of Inter-project Technical Dependencies and their Characteristics within Large Software Ecosystems Kelly Blincoea,∗, Francis Harrisonb, Navpreet Kaurb, Daniela Damianb aUniversity of Auckland, New Zealand bUniversity of Victoria, BC, Canada Abstract Context: Software projects often depend on other projects or are developed in tandem with other projects. Within such software ecosystems, knowledge of cross-project technical dependencies is important for 1) practitioners under- standing of the impact of their code change and coordination needs within the ecosystem and 2) researchers in exploring properties of software ecosystems based on these technical dependencies. However, identifying technical depen- dencies at the ecosystem level can be challenging. Objective: In this paper, we describe Reference Coupling, a new method that uses solely the information in developers online interactions to detect technical dependencies between projects. The method establishes dependencies through user-specified cross-references between projects. We then use the output of this method to explore the properties of large software ecosystems. Method: We validate our method on two datasets | one from open-source projects hosted on GitHub and one commercial dataset of IBM projects. We manually analyze the identified dependencies, categorize them, and compare them to dependencies specified by the development team. We examine the types of projects involved in the identified ecosystems, the structure of the iden- ∗Corresponding author Email addresses:
[email protected] (Kelly Blincoe),
[email protected] (Francis Harrison),
[email protected] (Navpreet Kaur),
[email protected] (Daniela Damian) Preprint submitted to Elsevier February 2, 2019 tified ecosystems, and how the ecosystems structure compares with the social behaviour of project contributors and owners.