Software Ecosystems Architectural Health: Challenges x Practices

Over time many software ecosystems have achieved success. Several organizations are opening their software projects for external businesses, creating an multi-organizational government to development their software platform The software architecture has an important participation in this success. In this context, there are some studies describing architectural challenges for software ecosystems, but little research is investigating how these challenges are being faced by software ecosystems organizations. This paper presents an initial investigation how open source software (OSS) ecosystems have faced several architectural challenges. We conducted interviews with three architects of different OSS ecosystems and gathered some architectural practices to lead with challenges. We also analyzed how these architectural practices have influenced the software ecosystem health, introducing the concept of Software Ecosystems Architectural Health.