Sharing Experience Around Component Compositions: Application to the Eclipse Ecosystem

Society currently lives in a world of tailorable systems in which end-users are able to transform their working environment while achieving their tasks, day to day and over the time. Tailorability is most of the time achieved through dynamic component integration thanks to a huge number of components available over the Internet. In this context, the main problem for users is not anymore the integration of new components, but how to find the most interesting set of components that will fulfill their needs. Facing this issue, the authors' assumption is that it would be helpful for users to take benefit of the experience of other users and our work aims at enhancing current software ecosystems to support this sharing of experience. The authors have applied this approach in the context of software development while considering Eclipse as one of the most advanced and used software ecosystem. The authors then offer ShareXP, an Eclipse feature that allows members of a group to share their expertise, this expertise being embodied in the “compositions” each of them has built. ShareXP was already presented in (Bourguin et al., 2012). The current paper is an extension where the authors deeper show that ShareXP is only a first step in their global approach trying to enhance not only the Eclipse ecosystem, but software ecosystems in general.