Architectural Design Decisions in Open Software Development: A Transition to Software Ecosystems

Abstract

Managing architectural design decisions (ADDs) in software development process is an essential task for architectural knowledge management. As software ecosystems become a new software development paradigm in software engineering processes, it is important and necessary to capture and represent ADDs in open software development, and to evolve architectural knowledge with minimum knowledge evaporation in the open ecosystem community. So far, little work has been done on managing architectural decisions in software ecosystems in current software architecture research and practice. In this research position paper, we discuss the typical characteristics of software ecosystems which may influence architecture decision-making processes in software development, and identify the essential aspects that should be considered for managing ADDs in the context of software ecosystem. In addition, we discuss major challenges of managing ADDs for software ecosystems, and we also propose possible directions in research to solve the problems.