Research PapersECSA 2021

The European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) is the premier European software architecture conference, providing researchers, practitioners, and educators with a platform to present and discuss the most recent, innovative and significant findings and experiences in the field of software architecture research and practice. The 15th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA 2021) will be held from 13 to 17 September 2021.

ECSA 2021 was originally planned in the beautiful city of Växjö Sweden. Yet due to COVID-19 and considering what impact this may have on the conference, the ECSA Steering and Organizing Committee decided to organize ECSA 2021 as a virtual event.

We would like to express our empathy and condolences with those affected by COVID-19. Our primary concern is that members of our community, and their families and friends, remain safe and well.

Accepted Papers

Guidelines for Reviewers

Submission Quality Criteria

These criteria are extracted from that published by ICSE 2021. Reviewers must carefully consider them when evaluating the papers submitted to the ECSA 2021 Technical Track:

• Significance: the paper details its importance with respect to challenges to be solved by the software architecture community, discussing their relevance and usefulness especially to architecting for the digital society.
• Soundness: the paper’s contributions are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods, constraining claims to what can be supported by results and discussing its limitations.
• Novelty: the paper’s contribution is sufficiently original and is clearly explained with respect to the state-of-the-art.
• Verifiability: the paper includes sufficient information to support independent replication or reproduction of the contributions claimed.
• Presentation quality: paper’s quality of writing meets the high standards of ECSA, including clear descriptions and explanations, adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions provided.

Review Quality Criteria

All the reviews are expected to meet the following criteria to provide authors with proper feedback:

1. Reviewers will check that the Submission Quality Criteria are properly satisfied by the submissions evaluated.
2. Reviewers will provide constructive suggestions or ideas to improve the quality of the paper.
3. Reviewers will describe criticisms and comments in an argumentative and reasoned way, using a polite tone.
4. Reviewers will suggest relevant related work as required, such as empirical standards, related papers highly relevant for the community, open repositories, etc.
5. It is strictly prohibited that reviewers request any reference to their own work. This is a mandatory aspect that will be monitored during the whole review process. Only on request to and acceptance of the PC Chairs, citation requests well motivated to improve the paper content will be allowed.

Additional guidelines for the review process

• Review Authorship. PC members will author their reviews, asking for sub-reviewers just for additional feedback.
• Substantial Reviews. PC members are requested to submit a thorough and careful review. Please, pay attention to the bidding process to select those papers closer to your area of expertise.
• Ethical Issues. PC members should inform PC co-chairs if they detect any evidence related to plagiarism, concurrent submission, etc.

Call for Papers

The European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) is the premier European software architecture conference, providing researchers, practitioners, and educators with a platform to present and discuss the most recent, innovative and significant findings and experiences in the field of software architecture research and practice. The 15th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA 2021) will be held from 13 to 17 September 2021.

ECSA 2021 was originally planned in the beautiful city of Växjö Sweden. Yet due to COVID-19 and considering what impact this may have on the conference, the ECSA Steering and Organizing Committee decided to organize ECSA 2021 as a virtual event.

We would like to express our empathy and condolences with those affected by COVID-19. Our primary concern is that members of our community, and their families and friends, remain safe and well.

SPECIAL ISSUE

Selected papers from the conference will be considered for a Special Issue on “Architecting for the Digital Society” in the Journal of Systems and Software (JCR IF 2.450).

https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-systems-and-software/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-architecting-for-the-digital-society

SCOPE

ECSA 2021 aims to focus on how Software Architecture can enable the success of the next generation of software-enabled systems to address the challenges of society, such as health, climate, sustainability, mobility, diversity, and future of production. This raises questions such as: What are the current research successes that position Software Architecture at the core of the ability to build and sustain systems of the future? What automation, tools, and techniques do software architects and engineers need in order to ensure architectures developed are adaptable, evolvable, verifiable, and meet their quality and functional requirements?

The program committee of 15th European Conference on Software Architecture seeks submissions of original and unpublished high-quality papers describing fundamental and applied research, new methods, approaches, and processes, novel applications, approaches for education and training in software architecture, and experience reports on all topics related to software architecture including, but not limited to:

• Foundational principles of software architecture
• Linking requirements engineering and software architectures
• Quality attributes and software architectures
• Architectural design, analysis and evaluation
• Architecture description languages and meta-models
• Architecture verification and validation
• Management of architectural knowledge, decisions, and rationale
• Cross-disciplinary efforts and software architecture
• Architectures for reconfigurable and self-adaptive systems
• Architectural concerns of autonomic systems
• Architectural patterns, styles and tactics, reference architectures
• Architecture viewpoints and views
• Architecture conformance
• Software architecture and virtualization
• Architecture-centric process models and frameworks
• Software architecture and agility, continuous integration, continuous development and DevOps tools
• Component-based models and deployment, middleware
• Software architecture and system architecture, including software-defined networking
• Software tools and environments for architecture-centric software engineering
• Cultural, economic, business, social and managerial aspects of software architecture
• Software architecture in different areas such as the cloud/edge-cloud, big data, blockchain, cyber-physical systems, IoT, autonomous systems, systems of systems, energy-aware software
• Architecture and technical debt
• Empirical studies, systematic literature reviews, and mapping studies in software architecture.

PAPER SUBMISSIONS

ECSA 2021 seeks three types of papers for the research track:

• Research papers (max. 16 pages in LNCS style) which describe novel contributions to software architecture research (submissions should cover work that has a sound scientific/technological basis and has been validated)
• Education and training papers (max. 16 pages in LNCS style) that address methodologies, experiences and best practices in teaching and training of software architecture.
• Short papers (max. 8 pages in LNCS style) that present novel and preliminary work-in-progress or challenges in a topic of software architecture research or education and training software architectures. Submissions must have a sound basis, but not necessarily be validated in full.

All submitted papers will undergo a rigorous single-blind 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. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. For this aim, plagiarism checking will be conducted and any paper reporting more than 20% of coincidence will be desk-rejected.

All contributions must be formatted according to the Springer LNCS style (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0). The aforementioned limit of pages includes figures and references.

Contributions need to be submitted in pdf format via EasyChair to the ECSA 2021: Easy Chair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecsa2021. Please indicate “ECSA 2021 Research Track” in the category field.

The proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag as part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Abstract Submission: May 13th, 2021
• Papers submission: May 17th, 2021
• Notification of papers: June 14th, 2021
• Camera ready: June 27th, 2021

Submission dates are 23:59h AoE (anywhere on Earth). Submission dates are strict and no extensions will be granted.

ORGANIZERS

• General Co-Chair, Raffaela Mirandola, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• General Co-Chair, Danny Weyns, KU Leuven, Belgium and Linnaeus University, Sweden
• Program Co-Chair, Stefan Biffl, Technische Universität Wien, Austria
• Program Co-Chair, Elena Navarro, University of Castilla‐La Mancha, Spain