The success of software ecosystems highly depends on the variety and quality of end-user applications. Therefore, attracting third-party developers and facilitating application development is crucial. Platform boundary resources enable third party developers to create the applications. Thus, the platform boundary resources expose and extend the platform architecture.

We conducted an industrial case study on third-party developer experience, particularly on the role of platform boundary resources in exposing the platform architecture and facilitating development. The studied ecosystem is centered on managing end-users’ content across devices; the ecosystem was in its pre commercial phase. The results identify the platform boundary resources in the case study and propose a model for classifying the resources. Further, designing the platform boundary resources is not only about opening up the platform architecture. Instead, the platform boundary resources need to account for a rich variety of applications, or at least not limit too much the creativity of third party developers, while still aiming at the ease of development.We conclude that the platform boundary resources need to be created for the third-party developers, rather than from the platform architecture.

Vittorio Dal Bianco (Aalto University) , Varvana Myllärniemi (Aalto University) , Marko Komssi (F-Secure) and Mikko Raatikainen (Aalto University):  The Role of Platform Boundary Resources in Software Ecosystems: A Case Study

Presented at WICSA 2014, The 11th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (Sydney), 7-11.4.2014

http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/wicsa/2014/3412/00/3412a011.pdf