The idea of software ecosystems encourages organizations to open software projects for external businesses, governing the cross-organizational development by architectural and other measures. Even within a single organization, this paradigm can be of high value for large-scale decentralized software projects that involve various internal, yet self-contained organizational units. However, this intraorganizational decentralization causes architecture challenges that must be understood to reason about suitable architectural measures.We present an in-depth case study on collaboration and architecture challenges in two of these large-scale software projects at Siemens. We performed a total of 46 hours of semi-structured interviews with 17 leading software architects from all involved organizational units. Our major findings are: (1) three collaboration models on a continuum that ranges from high to low coupling, (2) a classification of architecture challenges, together with (3) a qualitative and quantitative exposure of the identified recurring issues along each collaboration model. Our study results provide valuable insights for both industry and academia: Practitioners that find themselves in one of the collaboration models can use empirical evidence on challenges to make informed decisions about counteractive measures. Researchers can focus their attention on challenges faced by practitioners to make software engineering more effective.

Abstract-The development of large-scale software productlines within large enterprises commonly involves various internal business units. Although within the same enterprise, each business unit has individual motivations and participation interests. For coordinating development, the emerging discipline of software ecosystems intents to explicitly discover and analyze the different players' interests, and manage them, often by means of a suitable software architecture. Already within a single enterprise, this discipline can be of high value. Instead of detailed managerial orders to coordinate internal interactions, an analysis of the players, their interests, and a suitable software architecture may slacken organizational structures and simplify processes.We have started to analyze the ecosystems of several Siemens internal product-lines in order to determine the different players and their interests, and to derive suitable software architectural requirements from this setting. This will enable us to compare these requirements to the actual architecture, for identifying reusable pain points and best practices of the existing system. However, there is no systematic (A) approach to model and analyze the collaboration among the participants from a technical perspective, as well as (B) to derive reusable architectural designpatterns and anti-patterns from such software ecosystems. By illustrating these problems using an existing software productline that moves towards a software ecosystem, we are looking for answers to the two questions above to evaluate whether our product-lines are fit for a future as internal software ecosystems.

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