A Reference Architecture for Enhanced Design of Software Ecosystems

Software ecosystems have become a novel architectural approach to extend software development to the outside of companies, where third-party providers develop applications on top of a common platform. While designing software ecosystems, platform providers face an overwhelming design space of business and technical architectural decisions. Usually, enterprise architecture modeling languages such as ArchiMate are used to design the ecosystem around the platforms. Despite a body of work studying architecture of software ecosystems, there is still a lack of a reference architecture that captures both business and technical aspects, which can be followed by platform providers to design these systems. In this paper, we develop a reference architecture by using different sources of information such as existing ecosystems and the literature. After identifying the shortcomings of the ArchiMate language to design software ecosystems, we extend the language using the reference architecture to enable direct and enhanced modeling of ecosystem-specific concepts. The extended ArchiMate has been implemented in a tool that we use to design a real-world ecosystem called F-Droid. Our results show the reference architecture captures the F-Droid ecosystem architecture. Bad architectural smells are detected, and improvement suggestions are made. Our work will assist platform providers to improve architectural decision-making by making informed design decisions.