WICSA is the premier gathering of practitioners and researchers interested in finding out about and improving on the state of practice of Software Architecture. WICSA is a working conference and so isn’t just about sitting and listening. Alongside the traditional conference keynotes and paper sessions, WICSA includes interactive working sessions where practitioners and researchers discuss their experiences in order to understand the current state of the field, and identify opportunities to make a difference in the future. For decades practitioners have been designing, managing, and exploiting architectures. Through these experiences practitioners have gained a wealth of knowledge of what works and what doesn't work. Researchers have been developing theories, methods, and tools to support the development and use of software architecture but are generally restricted to testing their results and tools on toy architectures and with hopes that the results will be a value to practitioners. WICSA helps to bridge the gap and allow both sides to meet and exchange views, insights and results.
The 5th WICSA conference is actively soliciting contributions from practicing software architects to help make the working sessions a success. We are looking for reports and position statements that describe your past experiences, both positive and negative, or your ideas for improving the state of the art.
WICSA 5 working sessions will be the ideal venue for you to discuss your successes, failures, and ideas with other practitioners and researchers. Your input will help identify how best to move the state of both research and practice forward. The conference working sessions will focus specifically on the transfer of information on best and worst experiences from the trenches and descriptions of areas where research progress is slowed because of lack of access to real world problems. Working sessions will be used to collect examples of existing best practices; identify characteristics of existing methods and techniques; identify gaps in the state of the practice; and propose new research directions to fill those gaps.
Working session papers need not be the completed research papers, but can be short experience reports, statements of opinion, descriptions of techniques or technologies or other topics in the field of software architecture. The working groups at the conference will be organized based on the working session papers submitted and so there is no fixed list of topics. Some of the themes that have been of interest at previous conferences include:
Submissions can be of any length but must not exceed 10 pages in IEEE conference paper format and should be submitted by May 13 to the WICSA5 submission site (via http://www.wicsa.net).