AGRI-Dash Evaluation of the Software Ecosystem Dashboard with Domain Experts (MSc)

Level: MSc

AGRI-Dash Evaluation of the Software Ecosystem Dashboard with Domain Experts

Software is built in complex networks of software producing organizations, also called software ecosystems. Various stakeholders require insight into the software ecosystems they work in [1, 2]. For example:

• An investor will for instance need data about the of a new technology or the prevalence of an old one.
• a software engineer who needs information about the in a particular technology ecosystem, to decide to retrain into that technology.
• an active group of software users simply want to know if they are taking any in selecting a particular technology for use in their organisation.

To provide such insight, dashboards are being designed that support stakeholders working in software ecosystems when decisions. These dashboards provide insight into otherwise impervious data sets, such as data around business ecosystems or data around open source repositories. One such dashboard is called SECODash and has been developed at Utrecht University and is currently running in a private beta.

In this project, we aim to perform an evaluative interview study with experts from a particular domain, to see what their needs are in such a dashboard. As this project is a collaboration between Wageningen University, Utrecht University, and Technical University Eindhoven, we will perform our first rounds of evaluations with experts in the agriculture software domain [3]. In particular, we wish to speak to people making decisions around agriculture software, such as software engineers, CIOs of large agriculture software companies, and even policy makers in the agriculture domain.

As the outcome of this interview study, we hope to find out which features in the current version of the dashboard are valuable, and which new requirements our target audience will introduce. We look forward to working with a student who is willing to get familiar with Gioia [4] or grounded theory.

References:

[1] Slinger Jansen. A focus area maturity model for software ecosystem governance. Information and Software Technology, 2020 (pdf). (open access)

[2] Jansen, S., Cusumano, M., & Popp, K. M. (2019). Managing Software Platforms and Ecosystems. IEEE Software, 36(3), 17-21. (pdf)

[3] Tekinerdogan, B., & Scholten, H. (2015). Software Ecosystems for the Life Sciences Application Domains. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 40(6), 1-6.

[4] Magnani, G., & Gioia, D. (2023). Using the Gioia Methodology in international business and entrepreneurship research. International Business Review, 32(2), 102097.

Contact person(s)

Bedir Tekinerdogan (bedir.tekinerdogan@wur.nl)

Slinger Jansen (slinger.jansen@uu.nl)