COMPARCH

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the Seventh International ACM SIGSOFT Conference on the Quality of Software Architectures -- QoSA 2011 and the 2nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Architecting Critical Systems -- ISARCS 2011.

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. Past themes for QoSA include Research into Practice -- Reality and Gaps (2010), Architectures for Adaptive Software Systems (2009), and Models and Architecture (2008).

At QoSA 2011, researchers discussed approaches to quality evaluation and management that address different stages of the software life cycle, such as requirements, design, implementation, testing and maintenance following QoSA's theme "Quality throughout the Software Lifecycle."

ISARCS 2011 is the second edition of a new symposium in the area of architectural design for dependable, safe and secure systems. ISARCS focuses on both theory and practice for architecting critical systems. Architecting such systems faces the big challenge of guaranteeing both the perceived and objective dependability and security, even if accepting service degradation. This requires trade-off among the various attributes of dependability and security that cannot be considered in isolation. The present edition sees contributions on architecting safe and secure systems in different application domains.

QoSA and ISARCS have been organized as part of the federated event CompArch, a series of federated events on Component-based Software Engineering and Software Architecture. In addition to QoSA 2011 and ISARCS, CompARch 2011 includes CBSE 2011, the "14th International ACM Sigsoft Symposium on Component Based Software Engineering" and WCOP 2011, the "16th International Workshop on Component-Oriented Programming."

CompArch 2011 was co-located with WICSA 2011 (9th Working International Conference on Software Architecture). We had a great cooperation with WICSA organizers, the general chair Raghu Sangwan, the PC chairs Patricia Lago and Rich Hilliard and Industry Chair Olaf Zimmermann.

CompArch and WICSA were fortunate to have four prominent keynote speakers. Pamela Zave (AT&T Laboratories - Research, USA) and Bran Selic (Malina Software Corp.) gave the conference keynotes, and Ian Gorton (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) and Michael Stal (Siemens Research and Technologies) the Industry Day keynotes.