Nowadays companies like Apple create ecosystems of third- party providers and users around their software platforms. Often online stores like Apple App Store are created to directly market third-party solutions. We call such ecosystems store-oriented software ecosystems. While the architecture of these ecosystems is mainly derived from busi- ness decisions of their owners, ecosystems with greatly different archi- tectural designs have been created. This diversity makes it challenging for future ecosystem providers to understand which architectural design is suitable to fulfill certain business decisions. In turn, opening a plat- form becomes risky while endangering intellectual property or scarifying quality of services. In this paper, we identify three main design options of store-oriented software ecosystems by classifying existing ecosystems based on similarities in their business decisions. We elaborate on the design options, discuss their main contributions, and provide exemplary ecosystems. Our work provides aspiring ecosystem providers with the reusable knowledge of existing ecosystems and helps them to take more informed architectural decisions and reduce risks in future.

Software companies nowadays create ecosystems of users and third-party providers around their platforms. They often provide online stores so that the third-party developments can be exposed to users directly. The resulting ecosystems differ significantly from each other in their architectural designs because their providers differ in terms of business goals and contexts. Until now, this architectural diversity and rationale behind it are not well-understood. Therefore, it is not clear which software features contribute to ecosystem’s success with respect to certain business goals and context. This hinders systematic creation of ecosystems in the future. Thus, decision-making becomes too risky; for future ecosystem providers, which may lead to creation of inefficient ecosystems that lack critical features, and for third-party providers to rely on ad-hoc choices while deciding on suitability of an ecosystem for their future career. In this paper, we introduce three design patterns for store- oriented software ecosystems by classifying the design decisions, business goals, and context of 111 store-oriented software ecosystems. Each design pattern provides an architectural solution to achieve a different business goal while supporting a different context. We discuss how the design patterns are applied together in order to achieve more business goals. Our work supports ecosystem and third-party providers by sharing practice-proven architectural solutions, helping them to take informed architectural decisions and reduce technical risks.

Pioneers of today’s software industry like Salesforce and Apple have established successful ecosystems around their software platforms. Architectural knowledge of the existing ecosystems is implicit and fragmented among online documentation. In protection of intellectual property, existing documentation hardly reveals influential business strategies that affect the ecosystem structure. Thus, other platform providers can hardly learn from the existing ecosystems in order to systematically make reasonable design decisions with respect to their business strategies to create their own ecosystems. In this paper, we identify a variability model for architectural design decisions of a store-oriented software ecosystem product line from an enterprise perspective, comprising business, application, and infrastructure views. We derive the variability model from fragmentary material of existing ecosystems and a rigorous literature review using a research method based on the design science paradigm. To show its validity, we describe real-world ecosystems from diverse domains using the variability model. This knowledge helps platform providers to develop customized ecosystems or to recreate existing designs in a systematic way. This, in turn, contributes to an increase in designer and developer productivity.

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects the things of our everyday life and supports usin our common activities.Several markets for IoT services have been created. These markets enable IoT users to search and compose services in order to support an IoT activity.However, existing IoT markets like IFTTT (If This Then That) are not convenient for users with respect to service discovery and composition.The objective of On-the-fly (OTF) computing is to configure and provide software markets that fulfill individual users' wishes by the automatic on-the-fly composition of single services.The architecture framework of On-the-fly computing markets helps architects to systematically develop these systems in different domains.In this paper, we use our OTF architectural framework to examine the requirements of a reference architecture for IoT markets.Furthermore, we perform a comparison between the architecture of IFTTT as an existing IoT market with this reference architecture. The results show how existing IoT markets can be improved. In return, the practical knowledge of IFTTT is taken to the reference architecture.This knowledge helps to overcome the limitations of today's IoT markets or creating new markets in the future.

Das Enterprise Architecture Management stellt umfangreiche Methoden, Modelle und Frameworks f{\"u}r die Modellierung von Unternehmensarchitekturen zur Verf{\"u}gung. Die Entwicklung von Software und deren Integration in IT-Landschaften ist heutzutage zunehmend von Komplexit{\"a}t und Unsicherheit gepr{\"a}gt. Dieser Beitrag (Research-in-progress) m{\"o}chte ein neues Paradigma – das „On-The-Fly Computing“ – vorschlagen, um diesen Herausforderungen zu begegnen, m{\"o}gliche L{\"o}sungsans{\"a}tze zu diskutieren sowie erste Ergebnisse eines Referenzmodells f{\"u}r individualisierte IT-Dienstleistungen in dynamischen Software-M{\"a}rkten dokumentieren.

The provision of IT solutions over electronic marketplaces became prominent in recent years. We call such marketplaces IT service markets. IT service markets have some core architectural building blocks that impact the quality attributes of these markets. However, these building blocks and their impacts are not well-known. Thus, design choices for IT service markets have been made ad-hoc until now. Furthermore, only single aspects of such markets have been investigated until now, but a comprehensive view is missing.In this paper, we identify common features and their interrelations on the basis of a systematic literature review of 60 publications using grounded theory.This knowledge provides an empirical evidence on the interdisciplinary design choices of IT service markets and it serves as a basis to support market providers and developers to integrate market features. Thereby, we make a first step towards the creation of a reference model for IT service markets that provides a holistic integrated view that can be used to create and maintain successful markets in the future.

Existing software markets like Google Play allow users to search among available Apps and select one based on the description provided for the App or based on its rating. Future software markets facilitate on-the-fly composition of such Apps based on users’ individual wishes. Realizing such On-The-Fly Computing (OTF) markets requires support of sophisticated software features. In addition, suitable orchestration among such features needs to ensure well-alignment of business and IT aspects in case of run-time changes like market dynamics. However, all these introduce new architectural and management complexities, which are specific to such markets. An architecture framework for OTF markets will include design solutions to overcome these complexities. In my PhD, I aim at identifying an architecture framework for OTF markets including main architectural building blocks and a systematic development process. Such an architecture framework enables the development of OTF markets in the future. Furthermore, this knowledge can be used as a basis to improve existing software markets by integrating missing functionalities.