Architecture-Violation Management for Internal Software Ecosystems: An Industry Case Study

Large-scale intra-organizational, yet decentralized software projects that involve various selfcontained organizational units require architecture guidelines to coordinate development. Tool support allows for managing architecture-guideline violations to ensure software quality. However, the decentralized development across units results in significant violation-management hurdles that must be considered. Derived from our previous research, we have elaborated a set of capabilities required to manage guideline violations within two of these large-scale software projects at Siemens. Their main purpose is process support for resolving violations, aiming to reduce the architects’ and developers’ effort required to handle them. We developed a prototype that implements the capabilities and conducted a qualitative case study on their usefulness, involving 9 experts from our study systems. Our capabilities are considered as very important and reveal great potential to ease violation management for large-scale software engineering.