The goal of QoSA (Quality of Software Architectures) is to address aspects of software architecture
focusing 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.

In the seventh incarnation of QoSA, we expect researchers to present approaches to quality evaluation and management that address different stages of the software life cycle, such as requirements, design, implementation, testing and maintenance. At the same time, we also expect there will be clear challenges that remain to be resolved. For QoSA 2011 the theme is "Quality throughout the Software Lifecycle". Papers addressing both novel research results advancing the state-of-the-art of the field and experience learned from industrial case studies are welcome.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Evolving Architectures

• design decisions and their influence on the quality of software architecture
• maintaining software architectures in the presence of change
• architectural refactorings and their implications for quality
• architectural patterns and their quality impacts
• architectural standards and reference architectures
• model-driven architecture (MDA) and quality aspects

Architecture Evaluation:

• quality assessment of legacy systems and third party applications
• 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 of large and heterogeneous applications
• 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
• applications to industrial case studies and use cases

Architecture Management:

• assessment and enforcement of architectural conformance throughout the software lifecycle
• traceability of software architecture to requirements and implementation
• integration and assessment of large and heterogeneous software architectures

Application Domains:

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

The accepted contributions will be published in the ACM digital library. Papers should not
exceed 10 pages, must be written in English, and in the standard ACM format for conference
proceedings (guidelines are available at: www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html).
Papers must not have been previously published or submitted elsewhere. If accepted, the paper
must be personally presented at the QoSA 2011 Conference by one of the authors.
Manuscripts must be submitted through the submission system available online at
www.easychair.org/conferences/.

Extended versions of the best papers will be considered for a theme issue
of the Software and Systems Modeling Journal http://www.sosym.org