The International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2018) extends the WICSA and CompArch history and tradition as the premier gathering of practitioners and researchers interested in software architecture, in component-based software engineering and in quality aspects of complex software systems.

ICSA continues the WICSA tradition of a working conference, where researchers meet practitioners and where software architects can explain the problems they face in their day-to-day work and try to influence the future of the field. Interactive working sessions will be the place where researchers meet practitioners to identify opportunities to create the future.

The increasing size of software systems and the emergence of increasingly autonomous systems is asking for innovative software engineering practices. The way software is being developed and maintained is rapidly changing and must take into account multifaceted constraints like fast-changing and unpredictable markets, complex and changing customer requirements, pressures of shorter time-to-market, rapidly advancing information technologies, just to name a few of these new aspects. To cope with such constraints, software is increasingly produced according to rapid continuous software engineering development processes. The theme of ICSA 2018 is “Breaking Down Barriers” – leveraging advances like cross-functional and cross-national teams, scaling research to industry scale problems, bridging customer-developer divides, and working in Eoin Woods’s ‘intelligent connected’ world.

We welcome original papers that explore and explain the role of architecture in current systems as well as in near future systems, with special focus on self-adaptive, smart, and autonomous systems. This conference looks at what can be learned from our software architecture history, experience, studies, and best practices.

Types of submissions

We solicit the software architecture community the following types of submissions:

  • Technical research papers (10 pages) should describe original and significant results of theoretical, empirical, conceptual, or experimental research in software architecture research or industrial practice. The novelty of the contribution needs to be clearly described and the results validated. Technical research papers are limited to 10 proceedings pages, and will be evaluate based on soundness, significance, verifiability, and presentation quality, in that order.
  • Experience papers (8 pages) should describe significant experience in applying innovative approaches to software architecture domain, and should carefully identify and discuss important lessons learned, so that other researchers and/or practitioners can benefit from the experience. Of special interest are experience papers that report on industrial applications in software architecture. Experience papers are limited to 8 proceedings pages.

Topics

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

  • Architecture and CI&D, DevOps, and/or
  • Microservices
  • Model driven engineering for continuous architecting
  • Up-front architecture and agile development
  • Architecting Systems of Systems, IoT systems, CPSs, software ecosystems, self-adaptive systems, or autonomous systems
  • Component based software engineering and architecture design
  • Architecture evaluation and quality aspects of software architectures
  • Automatic extraction and generation of software architecture descriptions
  • Re-factoring and evolving architecture design decisions and solutions
  • Architecture frameworks and architecture description languages
  • Linking architecture to requirements and/or implementation
  • Preserving architecture quality throughout the system lifetime
  • Reusable architectural solutions
  • Software architecture knowledge management
  • Software architecture for legacy systems and systems integration
  • Architecting families of products
  • 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

Formatting and Submission Instructions

All submissions must conform to the Author Instructions. Please note that ICSA 2018 will pursue a double-blind review process for the main Technical track (only), which must be reflected by all submissions to this track. All papers are to be submitted electronically via the EasyChair submission system, by the submission deadline, and must not have been published before.

Important dates

  • Abstracts (mandatory) due: 18 January 2018
  • Full papers due: 25 January 2018
  • Notification of acceptance: 1 March 2018
  • Camera-ready due: 22 March 2018

Publication

All accepted contributions will be published in ICSA 2018 proceedings, and appear in IEEE Xplore Digital Library. At least one author of an accepted contribution is required to register and present the work at the conference. ICSA 2018 will ensure that all accepted contributions can be presented regardless of US immigration rules.

Organization

For more information please contact the Program Committee chairs:

  • Barbora Buhnova (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) – buhnova(at)fi.muni.cz
  • Neil Ernst (University of Victoria, Canada) – neil(at)neilernst.net
  • Clemens Szyperski (Microsoft, USA) – clemens.szyperski(at)microsoft.com