Towards guidelines for building a business case and gathering evidence of software reference architectures in industry

Abstract

Background

Software reference architectures are becoming widely adopted by organizations that need to support the design and maintenance of software applications of a shared domain. For organizations that plan to adopt this architecture-centric approach, it becomes fundamental to know the return on investment and to understand how software reference architectures are designed, maintained, and used. Unfortunately, there is little evidence-based support to help organizations with these challenges.;

Methods

We have conducted action research in an industry-academia collaboration between the GESSI research group and everis; Results

The results from such collaboration are being packaged in order to create guidelines that could be used in similar contexts as the one of everis; Conclusions

The created guidelines could be used by other organizations outside of our industry-academia collaboration. With this goal in mind, we describe the guidelines in detail for their use.;