Modern decentralized software ecosystems such as Bitcoin evolve through crowdsourced improvement proposals (IPs) that are continuously shaped and autonomously implemented by independent actors. As a result, these ecosystems exhibit Community-Driven Variability (CDV), a novel paradigm that extends beyond traditional variability-intensive systems and introduces new challenges that remain unsolved. With this thesis, we approach these challenges and step forward to enable a holistic, systematic treatment of this problem space. This includes (i) establishing a modeling formalism that adequately captures the versatility of CDV ecosystems, (ii) providing tool support for automated model extraction from the large corpus of open-source IP data, and (iii) integrating these mined models with analyses of concrete implementation derivatives.

I am a PhD Candidate in the Software Engineering Group (SEG) at the University of Bern. My research centers around secure and robust software, applied cryptography, and software variability in general. Additionally, I am passionate about decentralized privacy-preserving technologies that emphasize user sovereignty.