QoSA 2013 - 9th ACM SigSoft International Conference on Quality of Software Architecture

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 modeling 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 "Evolving Architectures". Papers addressing both novel research results advancing the state-of-the-art of the field and experience learned from industrial case studies are welcome. Reflecting the practical emphasis of QoSA, papers showcasing applications along with a sound conceptual contribution are particularly welcome. In addition to mature research papers this year we also welcome position papers presenting ground-breaking and more risky innovative research ideas, methods, and proposals that address unexplored areas of research and challenge current thinking and/or practices.

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

Architecture Design
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 standards and reference architectures
model-driven methods and tools for architecture design and implementation
Architecture Evaluation
quality assessment of legacy systems and third party applications
empirical validation, testing, prototyping and simulation for assessing architecture quality
quality attributes of software architectures
methods and processes for evaluating architecture quality
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
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
applications to industrial case studies and use cases
Submissions
We solicit two types of submissions: regular papers and position papers.

Regular papers should describe original and significant results of theoretical, empirical, conceptual, or experimental research and industrial practice. Regular papers are limited to 10 pages.
Position papers describe novel ideas or innovative proposals whose aim is to stimulate discussion related to experiences and ideas, rather than to present mature results. Position papers are limited to 6 pages