CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Important dates

Paper abstract due: April 1, 2012
Paper submission due: April 8, 2012
All other submissions due: April 13, 2012
Notification of decision on papers: June 11, 2012
Camera-ready paper due: June 22, 2012
Conference: 20-24 August 2012

Scope

The 10th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA) and the 6th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) will be jointly held to provide a unique forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss the latest R&D outcomes,experiences, trends, and challenges in the field of software architecture. Like WICSA/ECSA joint event of 2009, once again the synergistic coupling of WICSA and ECSA promises to offer even more inspiring and productive event in 2012.

WICSA/ECSA 2012 is the premier gathering of the researchers and practitioners interested in becoming familiar with and improving the state-of-the-art and the state-of-practice of software architecture. This joint gathering’s primary goal is to provide a forum for discussion among researchers and practitioners. This event will focuses on making progress in the field of software architecture theory and practice through a combination of presentations, working sessions, workshops, and tutorials.

WICSA/ECSA 2012 will have an exciting and interesting program consisting of keynote speakers, papers presentation sessions, and interactive working sessions where researchers and practitioners discuss their advances and experiences to understand the current state of architectural practice, and identify opportunities to make a difference in the future.

This environment means that the WICSA/ECSA 2012 will be the ideal venue for researchers and software architecture practitioners to discuss successes, failures, and ideas with each other, with these insights helping to identify how best to move the state of both research and practice forward.

Topics

The organizing committee of the WICSA/ECSA 2012 encourages submissions of research papers and experience reports related to all aspects of software architecture, but this year we are encouraging increased emphasis on the approaches and processes for architecting software and services for emerging technologies and next generation of software intensive systems and services.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Software architectures for cloud-based systems and services
Software architectures for energy efficiency and sustainability
Software architecture from ultra large to very small systems
Software architecture and software qualities
Architectural patterns, styles and viewpoints
Architecture description languages and model driven architecture
Software architecture modeling, analysis methods and tools
Software architecture knowledge management
Software architectures for emerging systems
Software architecture discovery and recovery
Software architecture for legacy systems and systems integration
Service oriented architecture, SOA migration and governance
Open architectures, product-line architectures, software ecosystems, systems of systems
Cultural, economic, business and managerial aspects of software architecture
Software architects’ roles and responsibilities
Training, education, and certification of software architects
State-of-the-art and state-of-practice in software architecture
Industrial experiments and case studies
Enterprise systems vs. software architecture
Types of submissions

WICSA/ECSA 2012 seeks two main categories of papers to foster the active participation of researchers and practitioners:

Full papers should describe original and significant results of theoretical, empirical, conceptual, or experimental research and industrial practice in software architecture. Full papers are limited to 10 proceedings pages, at most 8000 words. All papers should explicitly state the goals of systems or approaches described, discuss relationships to previous work, and use accepted, standard terminology. We especially welcome submissions of papers addressing practical evaluation and industrial application, as well as innovative approaches and ideas discussing emerging challenges.
Working Session Papers (max. 4 proceedings pages) which present promising achievements from work-in-progress in a topic of software architecture. They are intended to stimulate discussion related to ideas and experiences, rather than to present fully validated research results. Normally they will describe positive and negative characteristics of existing methods and techniques; identify gaps in the state-of-practice; or propose new research directions to fill those gaps. The accepted contributions will form the basis of the conference’s interactive working sessions.
All submitted papers will undergo a rigorous peer review process. Papers will be selected based on originality, quality, soundness, and relevance. All contributions must be original, not published, accepted or submitted for publication elsewhere.

In addition to peer reviewed full and working session papers, the conference will also provide a dynamic forum to allow researchers and practitioners to get together in a friendly and supportive environment to exchange ideas and experiences and discuss subjects not on the main program (see the Call for other kinds of contributions for other events to be organized during the conference on the website: http://www.wicsa.net).

Proceedings

The proceedings will be published by IEEE CS Press (http://www.computer.org/portal/site/cscps/index.jsp). All accepted papers will appear in the proceedings.

In addition, authors of best papers will be invited to submit revised and extended versions of their papers for the Special Section on Software Architecture of the Journal of Systems and Software (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jss).

Paper submissions

Submit your paper electronically in PDF via the Conference Management System at the conference web site (http://www.wicsa.net) (To Be Installed) using the IEEE CS proceedings format. Formatting Instructions: All submissions must be formatted according to the IEEE CS proceedings format (8.5″ x 11″ two-column format). Templates and instructions can be downloaded from the IEEE CS Press web site (http://www.computer.org/portal/site/cscps/index.jsp) at Information for Authors.

Length of Submissions: Papers (properly formatted in IEEE CS proceedings format) must not exceed the following size limits:

Full Papers: 10 pages (max 8000 words)
Working Session Papers: 4 pages (max 3000 words)
Experience presentations should be suitable for delivery in 25 minutes. The precise number of slides is left to the discretion of the author, but successful submissions are unlikely to exceed 20 slides. All submitted papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the WICSA/ECSA 2012 Program Committee.