Automated Assistance for Developing Software in Ecosystems of the Future

Software pervades every aspect of human life. Modern civilisation relies on software at an
increasing pace, and society needs to adapt itself to become more resilient against the
negative sides of the digital era. Software ecosystems are considered the most promising
avenue for organising the software needs of the future. They form large socio-technical
networks of technical and social components that interact with each other on top of common
software and hardware platforms. Well-known software ecosystems are operating system
distributions like Linux and Android, the popular R environment for statistical computing, and
the OSCAR digital health ecosystem for Electronic Medical Records.
SECO-ASSIST will pave the way by providing novel automated techniques to coordinate the
numerous contributors and contributions to such ecosystems as effectively as possible. To do
so, SECO-ASSIST will expand the state-of-the-art in software recommendation techniques to
meet the inherent challenges of future software ecosystems, namely scale, heterogeneity,
longevity and team interaction. The project consortium is composed of seasoned software
engineers that are research authorities in software evolution, software testing, static program
analysis and database usage. Their complementary expertise will permit a scientific
breakthrough which will nurture the software ecosystems of the future.