Rethinking Software Ecosystems

As the global software industry surpasses $700 billion in annual revenue and becomes increasingly essential to modern society, maintenance becomes essential to manage the complexity and risks of evolving large-scale software ecosystems.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers, industrial practitioners, and open-source contributors to collaboratively explore the multifaceted challenges of software supply chains and dependency management. The workshop revolves around three main challenges including the growing scale of software ecosystems, their conflicting values and practices, and the pressing need to establish trust and transparency in decentralized environments.
Diverse perspectives from fields such as software engineering, cybersecurity, and AI are welcome to understand and address the interconnected risks and opportunities inherent in today’s software ecosystems.

The workshop has three primary goals: (1) to build a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural network of experts; (2) to identify and validate core challenges faced by practitioners and researchers in managing software ecosystems; and (3) to build a research roadmap that will guide scientific and practice efforts over the next five years. Open discussion facilitating knowledge sharing and collaboration would serve as a foundation for long-term joint efforts toward building reliable and transparent software ecosystems.

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