SECO Patterns: Architectural Decision Support in Software Ecosystems

A software ecosystem challenges the architect through additional considerations, because multiple partners with different interests are involved. Therefore, the perspectives business, organization and high-level architecture need to be taken into account before deriving a detailed software design. In this paper, we present our vision and first results of SECO patterns, which capture solutions for recurring high-level problems in software ecosystems. They can be used standalone, but our vision also includes a two-step decision support system to aid the architect in two complex decisions: At first, it can propose relevant SECO patterns to support feature selection. The proposals are based on the specific characteristics of the software ecosystem of interest, which have to be provided by the architect. In a second step, the decision support system can aid the architect in applying a selected SECO pattern. For this step, we reuse the method and knowledge base of CoCoADvISE to provide guidance on decision making regarding the detailed software architecture.