Understanding the past, improving the present, and mapping out the future of software architecture
Software architecture has rapidly emerged as an important subfield of software engineering research and practice. Architecture has widely been recognized as the key facet of any software system, and a linchpin of software development processes. A software project’s fate is so tightly interwoven with its underlying architecture that it is now widely recognized that architecture is not just a development phase. Rather, it permeates every aspect of software development, from the initial conceptualization of the system through requirements to the system’s deployment and operation including supporting such activities as Software Configuration Management and Project Management. As such, it is important that our understanding of software architecture be aided by a rich accompanying body of underlying principles, techniques, standards, notations, and tools. The goal of the Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA) is to provide a unique on-going platform for the formulation, presentation, discussion, evaluation, and dissemination of this growing body of software architectural knowledge. WICSA is the only specialist conference series devoted to software architecture. As an interactive, working conference, WICSA provides a forum for researchers and practitioners to meet and exchange ideas about the state-of-the-art as well as the state-of-the-practice of architecture-based software engineering. The conference provides keynotes, paper sessions, lively panel discussions, and interactive working sessions where practitioners and researchers discuss their experiences, priorities, and perspectives in order to understand the current state of the field, and identify opportunities to make a difference in the future. The most recent WICSA, which took place in Pittsburgh in November 2005, was the fifth gathering in this series. WICSA-5 took place on the tenth ‘‘birthday’’ of modern software architecture research: it took place exactly ten years after the first International Software Architecture Workshop (ISAW-1) and the first two special issues of IEEE Software and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering devoted to this subject. To mark this anniversary, WICSA-5 aimed to be a dialogue between researchers