When developing commercial applications, developers seldomly start from scratch. Generally, they use software platforms and extend them, joining an ever growing software ecosystem surrounding the platform. In this paper, the relationships between architecture and platform adoption are explored by analyzing the results of interviews and document study of five case studies of platform extenders. It is found that platform architecture plays a minor role in platform adoption by platform extenders, but that quality attributes strongly influence an architect's design choices when extending a platform. The findings of this work can be used by platform developers to improve platform extendibility and usability.
['Slinger Jansen']
How quality attributes of software platform architectures influence software ecosystems