Architecture Challenges for Internal Software Ecosystems: A Large-Scale Industry Case Study

Abstract: The idea of software ecosystems encourages organizations to open soft-ware projects for external businesses, governing the cross-organizational development by architectural and other measures. Even within a single organization, this paradigm can be of high value for large-scale decentralized software projects that involve various internal, yet self-contained organizational units. However, this intra-organizational de-centralization causes architecture challenges that must be understood to reason about suitable architectural measures. In our FSE paper, we present an in-depth case study on collaboration and architec-ture challenges in two of these large-scale software projects at Siemens. We performed a total of 46 hours of semi-structured interviews with 17 leading software architects from all involved organizational units. Our major findings are: (1) three collaboration models on a continuum that ranges from high to low coupling, (2) a classification of architecture challenges, together with (3) a qualitative and quantitative exposure of recurring issues along each collaboration model. We identified compliant software development as the core challenge. It target