First international workshop on architectures for software systems workshop summary

As systems become more complex, the high-level organization of the overall system---the software architecture---becomes a critical aspect of design. Architectural concerns include organization of a system as a composition of components; global control structures; protocols for communication, synchronization, and data access; assignment of functionality to design elements; physical distribution; scaling and performance; dimensions of evolution; and selection among design alternatives.Recently, software architecture has begun to emerge as an important field of study for software engineering practitioners and researchers. Architectural issues are being addressed by work in areas such as module interface languages, domain-specific architectures, software reuse, codification of organizational patterns for software, architectural description languages, formal underpinnings for architectural design, and architectural design environments.While there has been considerable recent activity in this area, much of it has gone on in small groups and many of these efforts are operating without detailed knowledge of other on-going work. This workshop brought together researchers and practitioners interested in software architecture to discuss the current state of the practice and art. The primary goal was to establish a common understanding of the state of the practice, the kinds of research and development efforts that are in progress, and the important challenges for this emerging field.The response to the call for papers for this workshop provides convincing evidence of the increasing interest and importance of software architecture. There were 86 papers submitted, involving over 140 authors. Of these, 32 were chosen for inclusion in the workshop.These papers were distributed to the participants in the form of a workshop proceedings. The proceedings has recently been reissued as a Carnegie Mellon Technical report, "Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Software Architecture", CMU-CS-TR-95-151. Copies may be obtained from CS Documentation, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 (tel: 412-268-2596, email: [email protected]).The workshop organizing committee consisted of David Garlan, Workshop Chair (Carnegie Mellon University), Bob Balzer (USC Information Sciences Institute), Barry Boehm (University of Southern California), Martin Griss (Hewlett Packard Laboratories), Jeffrey Kramer (Imperial College), Doug Lea (SUNY Oswego & NY CASE Center), Dewayne Perry (AT&T Bell Labs), Mary Shaw (Carnegie Mellon University), Will Tracz (Loral Federal Systems), and Alexander Wolf (University of Colorado at Boulder).