How Has the Health of Software Ecosystems Been Evaluated? A Systematic Review

The health of the software ecosystems concerns to the growing and continuity to exist remaining variable and productive over time. Research on this area is becoming more important. Even today, no studies have been available summarizing the research on evaluation approaches for the health of software ecosystems. The objective of this study is to structure and analyze the available literature on this field identifying the state-of-the-art of the research. We conducted a systematic literature review to obtain an overview of the existing studies in this area. 23 studies were selected as primary studies by applying inclusion, exclusion and quality criteria. The findings show that the research area is quite immature. There are few approaches and tools to support the evaluation work. In these studies, only 3 reported a complete evaluation of the health of ecosystems, 5 studies were considered as initial proposals, and the others evaluated the health partially.