Benefits and Drawbacks of Reference Architectures

Abstract

Abstract. Reference architectures (RA) have been studied to create a consistent notion of what constitutes them as well as their benefits and drawbacks. However, few empirical studies have been conducted to provide evidence that support the claims made. To increase this evidence, this paper investigates the actual industrial practice of using RAs. The study consists of a survey with 28 stakeholders from everis, a multinational consulting company based in Spain. We report the findings and contextualize them with previous research.

A Survey on the Benefits and Drawbacks of AUTOSAR

“…This drawback was not reported in previous studies of software reference architectures [3,17]. It becomes necessary to balance between stability and updates of AUTOSAR, since some practitioners find that there are too many releases.…”

“…Finally, we plan to represent and aggregate the empirical evidence of this survey with the benefits and drawbacks reported in other studies about software reference architectures [3,17].…”

“…Also, some authors of this paper executed a case study on the benefits and drawbacks of using software reference architectures conducted in an IT consulting company [17]. Despite such research, more evidence should be gathered to be able to aggregate and generalize these results.…”

“…To devise the instrument to collect the data, we based the questions about benefits and drawbacks and their responses on previous research on software reference architectures [3,17].…”

Aggregating Empirical Evidence about the Benefits and Drawbacks of Software Reference Architectures

“…Previous studies reported the effects (i.e., benefits and drawbacks) caused by the use of SRAs, as well as the percentage in which they appeared in practice [3]- [5]. Other works have focused on analyzing the practices and constraints of SRA, and qualitatively reported how they moderate or imply the aforementioned effects [1], [2].…”