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Journal of Systems and Software (JSS)
Special Issue on Software Architecture

Journal of Systems and Software (JSS)

Since software architecture was established as a systematic discipline in the mid 1990's, it has been subject of increasing interest in software engineering research and practice. Three classic reasons why architecture is important to software systems are: (1) architecture provides a basis for creating mutual understanding about the software system; (2) architecture design decisions have the most significant influence on system qualities; and (3) architecture provides a reusable abstraction of a system that is transferable to other systems with similar requirements promoting large-scale reuse. In the last decade, the awareness has grown that the decision making process is central to architectural design, as manifested in the notions of rational and architecture knowledge.

Despite the important developments and substantial progress in the field of software architecture, much remains to be done to achieve the vision of software architecture as an engineering discipline. Moreover, new developments such as cloud computing, mobile computing, virtualization, big data, ultra-large scale systems and systems-of-systems require new architectural solutions and raise new research challenges for the field.

We invite to this special issue high-quality contributions with innovative and significant findings and experiences in the field of software architecture. We accept as submissions original and previously unpublished papers as well as extended versions of papers presented at the 11th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA 2017).

Objectives and topics

The aim of this special issue is to document new contributions to software architecture research. We seek high-quality and original contributions on principles, methods, foundations, techniques and tools as well as empirical studies, systematic literature reviews and mapping studies in the software architecture field.

All submissions should be supported by appropriate arguments and validation through case studies, experiments, or systematic comparisons with other approaches already in practice. Topics of interest include, but are not limited, to:

  • Foundational principles of software architecture
  • New developments in architectural design, analysis and evaluation
  • Management of architectural knowledge, decisions, and rationale
  • Innovative architecture-centric process models and frameworks
  • Architecture-centric model driven engineering
  • Architectures for reconfigurable and self-adaptive systems
  • Architectures for ultra-large scale, long-lived systems and systems-of-systems
  • Software architecture and the cloud
  • Software architecture and virtualization
  • Software architecture and big data
  • Architectures for cyber-physical systems
  • Architectural concerns of autonomic systems
  • Software architecture and system architecture, including software-defined networking
  • Software tools and environments for architecture-centric software engineering
  • Industrial applications, case studies, best practices and experience reports
  • Empirical studies, systematic literature reviews and mapping studies in software architecture.

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