Scope

WICSA is the premier international conference for software architecture research and practice. Over the past two decades, software architecture research has brought significant advances in areas such as architecture design styles and patterns, viewpoints, quality attributes, design rationale, architectural description languages, and evaluation methods. While these software engineering methods and tools have had broad practical impacts, evolving development and deployment technologies have also emerged for example, cloud computing, agile development, global software development and big data and these create major new challenges for the software architecture community.

The theme of the WICSA 2014 is “The Future of Software Architecture”. Software architecture as a discipline has produced many theoretical and practical results in the past two decades. As the software landscape continues to change rapidly and software systems become larger and more complex, new challenges for software architecture continue to emerge. We seek research papers and discussion papers that are directly related to this theme. We plan to dedicate a session to this theme.
Types of submissions

WICSA 2014 seeks technical papers in two categories: research papers and experience reports. Research papers should present original and novel contributions to software architecture research. Experience reports should describe the business/social context of the work, method or approach used, outcomes, lessons learned (positive as well as negative) and present some conclusions derived from the experience. Authors in either category may submit to WICSA 2014 in one of the two types of submissions: full papers and short papers.

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 pages, in IEEE Proceedings format. All papers should explicitly state the goals of systems or approaches described, discuss relationships to previous work, and should use accepted, standard terminology. We especially welcome submissions of papers addressing practical evaluation and industrial application, as well as innovative approaches and ideas addressing emerging challenges.
Short papers are intended to stimulate discussion of ideas and experiences. The results presented in a short paper are typically less mature and significant than the results presented in a full paper. Short papers are limited to 4 pages, in IEEE Proceedings format. Papers should trigger discussion and raise awareness and reflection on specific topics, in both research and industrial practice, such as: insights on existing methods and techniques; identifying gaps in the state of the practice; and proposals to fill those gaps .

Submissions must not have been previously published nor submitted or under consideration elsewhere for publication. All papers will be reviewed by at least three reviewers, and accepted papers will be published in the WICSA Proceedings by IEEE.

Topics

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

Software architectures for cloud-based systems and services
Software architecture from small systems to system-of-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 architecture for legacy systems and systems integration
Service oriented architecture, SOA migration and governance
Open architectures, product-line architectures
Cultural, social, economic, business, managerial and environmental 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
Industry best practices in software architecture
Software architecture design reasoning
Software architecture and development practices such as agile development and global software development
Technical debt in software architecture design

What do we look for in a paper？

WICSA looks for high-quality research and industry contributions in software architecture that are innovative, novel, and practical. The Program Committee comprises of experienced researchers and practitioners in the software architecture field. The criteria for evaluating a paper will be:

Contribution to body of knowledge: does this work contribute to the body of knowledge or improve the practice of software architecture?
Originality: has this problem been solved before, is this a new idea?
Validation: For research papers, is the research methodologically sound, empirically validated or experimentally sound? For experience report and industry track papers, are the analysis and facts clear and convincing? Have the methods, procedures been applied? Are the results credible?
Clarity: is the writing of the paper clear and comprehensible by the software architecture community?

Best Papers

Best WICSA full papers will be selected by a panel of session chairs. Authors of the best papers will be invited to submit their extended research to a special issue in the Journal of Systems and Software.
Submission

Authors should submit via the EasyChair system. The authors should submit an abstract in PDF format by 30th Sep 2013. The submission of the paper, replacing the abstract submission, must be made by 7th Oct 2013.

Venue

Sydney, Australia

Important Dates

Abstract submission deadline: 30 Sep 2013

Submission deadline: 7 Oct 2013

Notifications to authors: 16 Dec 2013

Camera ready copies ready: 10 Feb 2014