A Variability Model for Store-Oriented Software Ecosystems: An Enterprise Perspective

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.