These relationships are frequently underpinned by a common technological platform and operate through the exchange of information, resources, and artifacts.
The environment can be organizational (a company), social (an open-source community), or technical (the Ruby ecosystem).
The ecosystem metaphor is used in order to denote an analysis which takes into account multiple software systems.
[7] The most frequent of such analyses is static analysis of the source code of the component systems of the ecosystem.
This involves reviewing code, testing the software for bugs or vulnerabilities, ensuring compliance with design specifications, and optimizing for efficiency.