Architecture-Violation Management for Internal Software Ecosystems

Large-scale intra-organizational, yet decentralized software projects that involve various self-contained 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. In this paper, we present 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. Moreover, we present a prototype that implements the capabilities.