Towards reference architectures as an enabler for software ecosystems

Software ecosystems - a topic with increasingly growing interest in academia and industry in the past decade - arguably revolutionized many aspects of industrial software engineering (business models, architectures, platforms, project executions, collaboration models, distribution of assets, to name a few). Software ecosystems enable the contribution of external actors with distinct center a common technology and the potential distribution of the actor contributions to an existing user set. Reference architectures have been proven successful and beneficial for software product lines and traditional software development within distinct domains. They arguably come with a set of benefits that severely counterweights the additional effort of design and implementation. But what is the role of reference architectures in an ecosystem setting? In this position paper, we argue for the use of reference architecture as a means of facilitating the operation of software ecosystems, supporting not only the technical aspects but also business and organizational. Thus, we propose that reference architectures can be used as a tool to facilitate software ecosystem orchestration and promote the ecosystem health. In this work, we identify a set of challenges and propose a research agenda for the further development of the field towards efficiently improving the existing means of ecosystem orchestration.