The goal of QoSA (Quality of Software Architectures) is to address aspects of software architecture focusing broadly on quality characteristics and how these relate to the design of software architectures. Specific issues of interest are defining quality measures, evaluating and managing architecture quality, linking architecture to requirements and implementation, and preserving architecture quality throughout the lifetime of the system.

This year, the main topic of QoSA is architectures for adaptive software systems. Modern software systems must often reconfigure their structure and behavior to respond to continuous changes in requirements and in their execution environment. In this setting, quality models are helpful at the architectural level to guide systematic model-driven software development strategies by evaluating the impact of alternative architectural choices and the implied trade-offs. At run time, quality models can play an important role to enable calibration and validation of a system model in order to accurately reflect the properties of the executing  system. This leads to the idea that models should continue to exist at run time to drive the necessary dynamic changes that realize self-adaptation. Technical reports both on scientific novel results and industrial case studies are welcome.

Conference Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Architecture Design and Implementation:

• design decisions and their influence on the quality of software architecture
• architectural patterns and their quality impacts
• architectural standards and reference architectures
• model-driven architecture (MDA) and quality aspects
• relationship between quality attributes and architectural design properties

Architecture Evaluation:

• lessons learned and empirical validation of theories and frameworks on architecture quality
• empirical validation of testing, prototyping, simulation for assessing architecture quality
• models and specification techniques to evaluate quality
• attributes of software architectures
• languages for architectural modeling that allow the evaluation of quality characteristics
• processes for evaluating architecture quality
• evaluating the effects of architectural adaptations at run-time

Architecture Management:

• coordination of business architecture, business processes, and software architecture
• assessment and enforcement of architectural conformance, especially in the face of run-time adaptation
• traceability of software architecture to requirements and implementation
• integration of heterogeneous software architectures
• architecture evolution and architecture governance
• architectural models at run-time

Application Domains:

• component-based and service-oriented systems
• software product-lines
• pervasive and autonomic systems

Manuscript guidelines and publication

Accepted contributions will be published in a volume of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Papers should not exceed 16 pages, must be written in English, and prepared according to Springer's LNCS style (guidelines are available at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). Papers must not have been previously published or submitted elsewhere. If accepted, the paper must be personally presented at the QoSA 2009 Conference by one of the authors. Manuscripts must be submitted through the submission system available online at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=qosa2009

Important Dates

• Submission of papers: February 20, 2009
• Notification of acceptance: March 20, 2009
• Camera-ready paper due: April 11, 2009