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               Journal on Software and Systems Modeling
                       http://www.sosym.org/

                          Theme Issue on 
             Models for Quality of Software Architecture 
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Important Dates
===============
     * Intent to submit: January 15, 2012
     * Paper Submission: January 31, 2012
     * Notification: May 25, 2012
     * Special issue date: Late 2012


Scope and Topics
================

High quality of system architecture is essential for the long term 
success of a software product. Software engineers need to design and 
implement secure, maintainable, usable, efficient, and reliable 
software systems. They have to design architectures that can fulfill 
quality requirements, judge quality tradeoffs and ensure that the 
implementation adheres to the architecture. In case of long living 
software systems, they have to monitor, evaluate, and improve quality 
continuously throughout the entire software lifecycle. Models play a 
key role in supporting software engineers to master these tasks.
 
The goal of this special theme issue is to emphasize the deep 
relationship between system modeling and the quality of system 
architecture. For example, how can model-driven techniques for system 
development be used to assess and improve the quality of system 
architecture?  What are the connections between software modeling tools 
and quality assessment tools and environments? Papers that are bridging 
the gap between theory and practice and case studies illustrating the 
fundamental links between architecture quality and system modeling are 
particularly encouraged. 

In this theme issue of SoSyM, we invite original submissions that 
present novel model-based approaches to support software engineers 
in developing high quality software architectures for high-quality 
systems. 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
     * architecture and model 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 and model 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


Information for authors
=======================
Papers must be written in a scientifically rigorous manner with 
adequate references to related work. Submitted papers must not be 
simultaneously submitted in an extended form or in a shortened form to 
other journals or conferences. It is however possible to submit 
extended versions of previously published work if less than 75% of the 
content already appeared in a non- journal publication, or less than 
40% in a journal publication. Please see the SoSyM Policy Statement on 
Plagiarism at http://www.sosym.org/submission/ for further conditions.


Making a submission
===================
Communicate your intent to submit a paper by emailing the theme issue 
editors Dorina Petriu (petriu@sce.carleton.ca) and Jens Happe 
(jens.happe@sap.com) the following information before the Intent to 
Submit deadline: Title, Authors, and an Abstract.

Prepare your submission with either Word or LaTeX using Word and
LaTeX templates. Possible submission formats are:
 * Word (.doc, without macros)
 * Rich Text Format (.rtf)
 * PostScript (.ps, special fonts must be embedded)
 * PDF (saved as readable in version 5.0 or earlier)

Submit your work using the online submission system 
manuscript central at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sosym/:
 * In step 1, select "Special Section Paper" as the manuscript type
   and select "Dr. Bernhard Rumpe" as the "Editor-in-Chief" (EIC).
 * In step 4, add "Dorina Petriu" or "Jens Happe" as editor
   and choose "Designate as Preferred Editor".
 * In step 5, make sure field "Cover Letter" includes the line:
   "Submission for Theme Issue on QoSA".

   
Editors
=======
Dorina Petriu, Carleton University, Canada
Jens Happe, SAP Research Karlsruhe, Germany


Editors-in-Chief
================
Robert France, Colorado State University, USA
Bernhard Rumpe, RWTH Aachen University, Germany