Moving towards industrial software ecosystems: Are our software architectures fit for the future?

The development of large-scale software product-lines within large enterprises commonly involves various internal business units. Although within the same enterprise, each business unit has individual motivations and participation interests. For coordinating development, the emerging discipline of software ecosystems intents to explicitly discover and analyze the different players´ interests, and manage them, often by means of a suitable software architecture. Already within a single enterprise, this discipline can be of high value. Instead of detailed managerial orders to coordinate internal interactions, an analysis of the players, their interests, and a suitable software architecture may slacken organizational structures and simplify processes. We have started to analyze the ecosystems of several Siemens internal product-lines in order to determine the different players and their interests, and to derive suitable software architectural requirements from this setting. This will enable us to compare these requirements to the actual architecture, for identifying reusable pain points and best practices of the existing system. However, there is no systematic (A) approach to model and analyze the collaboration among the participants from a technical perspective, as well as (B) to derive reusable architectural design-patterns and anti-patterns from such software ecosystems. By illustrating these problems using an existing software productline that moves towards a software ecosystem, we are looking for answers to the two questions above to evaluate whether our product-lines are fit for a future as internal software ecosystems.