Analyzing and Visualizing Projects and their Relations in Software Ecosystems

More and more software projects are being consolidated into ecosystems to increase their discovery, usability, and usefulness. Some of the most popular ecosystems exist in npmjs, Python Package Indexing, and Apache Maven Repository. It is difficult for developers to relate these projects and use them to their full potential because of their number, the spread and depth of their features, and their intrinsic and accidental complexities. We present a technique—SECO Storms Maker—to capture and present the essential information from projects in an ecosystem to help developers join, use, and contribute to the ecosystem. We generate word-clouds based on the projects’ documentation via tokenization and distribution frequency. We identify relations among projects using grammar patterns scanning after part-of-speech tagging. We put these word-clouds into a graph to ease navigation and exploration. We evaluate our technique by manually building a ground truth and comparing a randomly-selected project with SECO to show its benefits.