Architectural strategies for interoperability of software-intensive systems: practitioners' perspective

ABSTRACTBackground: Currently, it is becoming increasingly common in the construction of more complex systems through the integration of existing and operational systems. To correctly construct these systems they must address interoperability requirements at different levels, i.e., technical, semantic, syntactic, and organizational. Several architectural strategies (i.e., architectural styles, patterns, and tactics) can be reused during such systems integration. However, there is a lack of evidence to orient which strategies and how they could be used during software integration practice. Objective: To investigate how architectural strategies have been used in practice to promote the interoperability of software-intensive systems. Method: We planned and executed an online survey with practitioners from different parts of the world, most of them with more than five years of experience in software integration. Results: We identified: (i) the main architectural strategies used in practice to promote different interoperability types in software-intensive systems; (ii) the difficulty level perceived by practitioners for using these strategies in real projects; (iii) the quality attributes more negatively impacted by these strategies; (iv) practitioners' suggestions to improve integration processes of software-intensive systems; (vi) common technologies used to integrate systems; (vii) and challenges perceived by practitioners during software-intensive systems integration. Conclusions: It is important to develop guidelines to assist practitioners in systematically selecting and applying the most suitable architectural strategies to their integration projects, analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of each strategy regarding other important quality attributes, such as security, reliability, and performance.