Net.ObjectDays, September, 20-22, 2005, Erfurt, Germany

http://www.qosa.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de

Download the QoSA 2005 Flyer in PDF Format

Registration forms for the Net.ObjectDays and for QoSA can be found at

http://www.netobjectdays.org/en/register/index.html

Early booking phase until August 12, 2005

Highlights:

• Invited Speaker: Christine Hofmeister, Lehigh U (US)
• Free access to Net.ObjetDays events and concurrent conferences
• Panel discussion: Future Directions of Software Architecture Quality
• Proceedings published by Springer as LNCS

One of the main motivations for explicitly modelling software architectures is to enable reasoning on software quality. From a software engineering perspective, a software architecture not only depicts the coarse-grained structure of a program, but also includes additional information such as the program's dynamics (i.e., the flows of control through the system) and the mapping of its components and connections to execution environments (such as hardware processors,
virtual machines, network connections, and the like). In this area, QoSA is concerned with research and experiences that investigate the influence a specific software architecture has on software quality aspects. Additionally, the development of methods to evaluate software architectures with respect to these quality attributes is considered to be an important topic. The quality attributes of interest include external properties, such as reliability and efficiency, as well as internal properties, such as maintainability.

From a business-oriented perspective, software architectures are most often embedded into a greater organizational context (e.g. large enterprises) and cannot be seen in isolation from that context. Requirements that emerge from this context have a major impact on the architecture being developed and have to be dealt with by means of a business-oriented management of software architectures. In this field, QoSA aims at investigating the impact that activities like the
coordination of business architecture and software architecture, business process modelling, assessment and acquisition of (COTS) components, as well as the integration or migration of legay systems have on the quality of software architectures.

Programme

(see www.netobjectdays.org for additional events)

One of the original motivations for explicitly modelling software architectures was the treatment of software quality attributes. These attributes can be either internal (such as maintainability) or external (such as performance, resource consumption or availability). Architectural models proved helpful for areas such as model-driven development, software product lines, or software migration. However, the impact that the organisation developing the software, architectural design decisions, and development processes have on software quality is still under investigation.

QoSA 2005 aims at bringing together researchers from academia and industry who are concerned with the different quality attributes and their influencing factors. Thereby, QoSA 2005 strengthens a unified view on software quality attributes for the following reasons:

First of all, software quality attributes often have strong interdependencies to each other. On the one hand, there are extrinsic relations, such as the increase of one property (e.g., performance) diminishes another property (e.g., maintainability). These dependencies force software architects to find trade-offs between related quality attributes. However, these dependencies are system-dependent, i.e., do not necessarily occur for all systems and design decisions. On the other hand, there are intrinsic interdependencies, since many quality attribute depend per definition on other quality attributes (e.g., reliability depends on the system's timing behaviour in real-time systems). Due to that, it is highly important to foster the exchange between several areas of research which have been historically divided into different communities (e.g., performance engineering, software reliability, software metrics, etc.). Progress in software quality research is to be expected by joining research efforts of several groups.

Moreover, software quality attributes typically are influenced by various factors. Besides the obvious (but not well-understood) impact of the architectural design, organisational issues (e.g. team structuring and individual software development processes) as well as aspects of the software development process (e.g. quality assurance measures like reviews and the deployment of so-called agile methods) have an impact on software quality. This is mainly known by anecdotal reports, but nearly not investigated in detail yet.

What is currently lacking are theories and conceptual frameworks which foster the evaluation of software architectures and thereby take into account the above identified factors that influence the quality of software architectures. These theories and frameworks would ground on but also extend our understanding on software quality attributes and have to be validated by the means of empirical software engineering. QoSA 2005 fosters the formation and evaluation of such theories and conceptual frameworks by taking a closer look on the design, evaluation, and management of software architectures from a software quality perspective.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Architecture design

• Design decisions and their influence on the quality of software architectures
• Organisational issues and processes which influence software architecture quality in a positive or negative way
• Architectural patterns and their quality impacts
• Lessons learned and empirical validation of theories and frameworks on software architecture quality

Architecture evaluation

• Models and specification techniques to evaluate the quality attributes of software architectures, which consider one or several influencing factors
• Processes for the evaluation of software architecture quality (including QA measures)

Architecture management

• Coordination of business architecture, business processes, and software architecture
• Development and enforcement of architectural decisions
• Architectural standards and reference architectures
• Assessment and integration of COTS components
• Integration of heterogeneous software architectures

We also intend to call for contributions for a special track on software architecture education. Details will be announced in a separate call for contributions and on the conference website.

We plan to publish the conference proceedings within the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. We accept research papers and experience reports. All Papers must be written in English and should be prepared using Springer's LNCS style. Electronic submissions are required. The acceptance of a paper implies that at least one of the authors will register for the conference and presents the paper.

Research papers must present original, unpublished research results that have not been submitted elsewhere and should be no longer that 15 pages including abstract, figures, and bibliography.

Experience reports present experiences relating to architectural quality in industrial projects and should be no longer than 5 pages.

Submission to QoSA 2005 is done by using OpenConf at http://jupiter.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/openconf

April, 29th, 2005: Submission of reports or papers

June, 6th, 2005: Notification of acceptance

July, 1st, 2005: Camera-ready version

Sep, 20-22, 2005: Net.ObjectDays

Ralf Reussner U Oldenburg / OFFIS (GER)

Judith Stafford Tufts U / SEI (US)

Sven Overhage U Augsburg / Oversoft (GER)

Steffen Becker U Oldenburg (GER)

Colin Atkinson U Mannheim (GER)

Antonia Bertolino ISTI-CNR (IT)

Alexander Brändle Microsoft Research (UK)

Christian Bunse Fraunhofer IESE (GER)

Michel Chaudron TU Eindhoven (NL)

Ivica Crnkovic U Mälardalen (SWE)

Peter Dadam U Ulm (GER)

Viktoria Firus U Oldenburg (GER)

Ulrich Frank U Duisburg-Essen (GER)

Kurt Geihs U Kassel (GER)

Ian Gorton NICTA (AUS)

Volker Gruhn U Leipzig (GER)

Willi Hasselbring U Oldenburg / OFFIS (GER)

Jean-Marc Jezequel U Rennes / INRIA (FR)

Juliana Küster-Filipe U Edinburgh (UK)

Stefan Kirn U Hohenheim (GER)

Jürgen Münch Fraunhofer IESE (GER)

Raffaela Mirandola U Roma (IT)

Dietmar Pfahl Fraunhofer IESE (GER)

Frantisek Plasil U Prague (CZ)

Iman Poernomo King's College (UK)

Andreas Rausch U Kaiserslautern (GER)

Matthias Riebisch TU Ilmenau (GER)

Bernhard Rumpe TU Braunschweig (GER)

Chris Salzmann BMW Car-IT (GER)

Heinz W. Schmidt Monash U (AUS)

Jean-Guy Schneider U Swinburne (AUS)

Johannes Siedersleben sd&m / FH Rosenheim (GER)

Elmar J. Sinz U Bamberg (GER)

Michael Stal Siemens AG (GER)

Clemens Szyperski Microsoft (US)

Kurt Wallnau SEI / CMU (US)

Wolfgang Weck Indep. Consultant (CH)