Colloquium Computer Science - Slinger Jansen, University of Utrecht

Title: Trust and Sentiment in Software Ecosystems

Abstract:

Software is built and maintained in the context of software ecosystems: large groups of organizations and software engineers collaboratively build software for a worldwide market. Increasingly, trust is starting to play a role in these ecosystems: why select a particular package and integrate it into my software project? Why download that app? Why select an enterprise resource planning system for an organization?

In this presentation, I outline what role trust plays in software engineering and how we can solidify this trust with data. After this, we dive into the details of a study where we establish trust using sentiment analysis for the selection of software packages. Sentiment analysis has proven effective across various domains for measuring the quality of services or products. Leveraging insights from established methods, we introduce ISOftSentiment, a hybrid sentiment analysis model that measures the software package quality by analyzing the sentiment of the quality attributes contained in software user reviews.

The model aims to offer software engineers a streamlined way to understand other users' perspectives on quality attributes, contributing to the overall insight into the characteristics of software packages and their underlying software ecosystems. ISOftSentiment offers a promising approach to assess software quality swiftly, saving software engineers substantial effort in data collection and analysis and providing crucial information for software selection.

Bio: Slinger Jansen is an associate professor at Utrecht University, where he leads the Software Ecosystems Security research group. He is one of the leading researchers in the domain of software ecosystems and co-founders of the International Conference on Software Business and International Workshop on Software Ecosystems. He is lead editor of the book “Software Ecosystems: Analyzing and Managing Business Networks in the Software Industry” and of several others. Furthermore, he is an associate editor for the Empirical Software Engineering journal.