A survey on design and usage of software reference architectures

Software reference architectures (SRA) have been around for quite some years. They have been designed and used with varying success. We have conducted an exploratory survey among software architects and developers to establish the extent to which SRA have penetrated among practitioners and to identify the benefits and problems practitioners face when using and designing SRA. In this article, we summarize the findings from our survey. For practitioners, the article provides valuable information on the benefits experienced from the usage of SRA and the challenges fellow practitioners face when designing and using SRA. For researchers and education bodies, the article provides valuable directions for future work needed in the field of SRA