Extensibility in ecosystem architectures: An initial study

Organizations that build software-intensive products participate in socio-technical ecosystems that encompass their collaborators, competitors, customers, and suppliers. STREAM, an ecosystem modeling method, provides three views of that ecosystem: business, software, and innovation. In the software view the architecture is the primary structuring element. It is our hypothesis that certain quality attributes of the architecture, such as expressiveness and extensibility, are important factors in the success of the ecosystem. Extensibility is normally presented through the API. We examine the APIs of three platforms, one that is increasing in use, one that is in steady use, and one that is declining in use. We use these initial results to generate hypotheses for further exploration.