At the beginning of the 21st century, both software engineering and business application development are facing a variety of challenges. On the one hand, there is significant pressure to streamline the development process and reduce the costs to create, deploy, and maintain software applications. On the other hand, software applications have to fulfill constantly growing demands, in particular as they are being recognized as integral parts of an organization's competitive advantage and as their significant impact on the corporate business strategy becomes obvious.
In order to better comply with these challenges, designing software architectures of good quality becomes a critical success factor. A software application is organized by its architecture that partitions it into elements and defines relationships among them. For this, we usually use multiple views, each with a different organizing principle. In addition, a software architecture supports reasoning about properties that are emergent and cannot be ascribed to particular elements. These properties are described using a language of quality attributes. Often, quality attributes, such as the system's performance or reliability, have a pervasive impact, are difficult to reverse, and preclude or constrain other properties. For these reasons, they have to be taken into account already during the design phase.
The conference on the Quality of Software Architectures (QoSA) is concerned with all of these topics. It brings together researchers and practicioners from a variety of disciplines to promote a better understanding of how to develop software architectures of good quality. This year's conference combined presentations of carefully reviewed papers, industrial experiences, keynotes, and discussion sessions that delved into topics of interest.