Software Visualization Tool for Evaluating API Usage in the Context of Software Ecosystems: A Proof of Concept

Abstract

Software Ecosystem (SECO) is a consolidated research area in software engineering, emerging as a paradigm for understanding dynamics and relationships among software systems that collaborate with each other to achieve their goals. Understanding the ecosystem and how its elements interact is essential for software evolution, especially for those that provide functions and services for other systems, such as software APIs. Once an API is being used by different software, future changes need to be made in a systematic and appropriate manner, considering the whole ecosystem. However, there is a lack of formal and effective ways for APIs evaluation in the context of SECO. Thus, in this paper, we present Ecolyzer, a prototype tool that aims to support the analysis of API usage considering its ecosystem through interactive visualization. To demonstrate the feasibility of our tool, we conducted a proof of concept (PoC) using an open-source platform API. The results obtained with Ecolyzer are useful and show that the prototype meets the goals described for the accomplishment of this work.