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.