The goal of QoSA (Quality of Software Architectures) is to address the quality aspects of software architecture, focusing broadly on its quality characteristics and how these relate to the design of software architectures. Specific issues of interest are defining and modelling quality measures, evaluating and managing architecture quality, linking architecture to requirements and implementation, and preserving architecture quality throughout the system lifetime. QoSA is the premier forum for the presentation of new results in the area of software architecture quality. It brings together researchers, practitioners and students who are concerned with software architecture quality in a holistic way. As a working conference QoSA has a strong practical bias, encompassing research papers, industrial reports and invited talks from renowned speakers.

This year the main theme of QoSA is “Architecting for Deployability”. Building software systems in a service-oriented manner and using cloud environments promises many benefits, however, raises new challenges for software architecture by increased complexity and fragility during operation. These rapidly changing systems require collaboration between software developers and operators, a strong integration of building, evolving and operating activities, as well as architectures which satisfy deployability in heterogeneous contexts. In this year's QoSA we particularly solicit contributions that explore the various implications of these upcoming architectures. This includes reference architectures, software architectures adapting at run time, architectural styles and patterns to foster deployability, as well as approaches exploring other critical quality properties, such as performance, reliability, security, safety, maintainability, and usability. At the same time, submissions related to the general topic of the conference are welcome.

Types of submissions

We solicit two types of submissions from the software architecture community: regular papers and short papers.

Regular papers should describe original and significant results of theoretical, empirical, conceptual, or experimental research or of experience from industrial practice. Reflecting the practical emphasis of QoSA, papers showcasing applications along with a sound conceptual contribution are welcome. Regular papers are limited to 10 pages.

Short papers describe novel ideas or innovative proposals whose aim is to stimulate discussion related to experiences and ideas, rather than to present mature results. Short papers are limited to 6 pages.

Topics

Topics of interest for the conference include (but are not limited to) the following themes:

    Architecture Design and Implementation
        design alternatives, trade-offs, and their influence on the quality of software architecture
        adapting software architectures to address changes in software and its environment
        architectural refactoring and its implications for quality
        architectural standards and reference architectures
        model-driven methods and tools for architecture design and implementation
        architecture patterns and styles improving various quality attributes
    Architecture Evaluation
        empirical validation, testing, prototyping and simulation for assessing architecture quality
        performance, reliability, maintainability, security and other quality attribute evaluations
        methods and processes for evaluating architecture quality (also in presence of the change)
        model-driven evaluation of software architecture quality
        evaluating the effects of architectural adaptations at run-time
        lessons learned and empirical validation of theories and frameworks on architecture quality
        quality assessment of legacy systems and third party applications
    Architecting for Deployability
        methods and tools for architecture instrumentation and monitoring
        run-time architecture modelling and analysis
        architectures supporting DevOps concepts
        methods and processes for adaptation and evolution of architectures
        architectures for self-adapting software-intensive system
    Architecture Management
        assessment and enforcement of architectural conformance throughout the software lifecycle
        traceability of software architecture to requirements and implementation
        models and tools for coping with software architecture evolution