While technical debt has emerged as a formal concept relatively recently [2] we have had technical debt from the earliest days of software development, it has simply evolved in nature. So what can we learn from past types of technical debt to allow us to prepare for its future forms?

Owing to the critical role of software-intensive systems in society, software engineers have the accountability to consider sustainability as a goal while structuring a software system. However, there are no practical guidelines providing a tangible decomposition of the sustainability aspect. Moreover, there are limited quantifiable methods to support sustainable design and analysis.The purpose of this study is to help software practitioners to take sustainability into account by providing systematic guidelines for the software engineering process. We propose a framework that presents a meta model to decompose sustainability requirements and an assessment approach to evaluate sustainability achievements.This work presents an integrated framework that combines a goal-based approach, scenario-based approach, and feature modeling to gather sustainability related requirements and corresponding features. For sustainability assessment, software analysis and machine learning techniques are utilized to analyze software products based on sustainability metrics and criteria.The empirical study conducted with participants from academia and industry revealed that the proposed framework improves participant's ability to consider sustainability aspect in their software engineering tasks through focusing on requirements, design, and evaluation. With the provided sustainability meta-model, the participants could extract more stakeholders, requirements, and features in shorter time. Moreover, the empirical study result also demonstrated that this study is capable to indicate specific scenarios that should be redesigned to improve the sustainability achievements level.

A previous study, run by some of the authors in collaboration with practitioners, has emphasized the need to improve architectural languages in order to (i) make them simple and intuitive enough to communicate effectively with project stakeholders, and (ii) enable formality and rigour to allow analysis and other automated tasks. Although a multitude of languages have been created by researchers and practitioners, they rarely address both of these needs. In order to reconcile these divergent needs, this paper presents an approach that (i) combines the rigorous foundations of model-driven engineering with the usability of semantic wikis, and (ii) enables continuous syncronization between them, this allows software architects to simultaneously use wiki pages for communication and models for model-based analysis and manipulation. In this paper we explain how we applied the approach to an industry-inspired case study using the Semantic Media Wiki wiki engine and a model-driven architecture description implemented within the Eclipse Modeling Framework. We also discuss how our approach can be generalized to other wiki-based and model-driven technologies.

This paper summarizes the workshop on Architecture-Based Testing and System Validation which was organized in conjunction with the 9th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture. The main goal of the workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners both from the architecture design and software testing community to enable architecture-based software testing.

Scenario based architectural assessment is a well established approach for assessing architectural designs. However scenario-based methods are not always usable in an industrial context, where they can be perceived as complicated and expensive to use. In this paper we explore why this may be the case and define a simpler technique called TARA which has been designed for use in situations where scenario based methods are unlikely to be successful. The method is illustrated through a case study that explains how it was applied to the assessment of two quantitative analysis systems.

This short document reports the content and results of the "Architecture Description Languages in Practice" working group held on 9th and 10th November 2005 at the WICSA 5 conference, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

A crucial aspect of the software architect’s role is to ensure that a system based on their architecture will exhibit the quality properties (performance, security, availability and so on) that are important to their stakeholders. A proven approach to help guide an architect through the process of designing an architecture is to use architectural views, based on formal viewpoint definitions (such as those in the well known "4+1" set). However, a practical problem we have found when using existing viewpoint sets is the lack of guidance relating to system qualities (as opposed to system structures) that they provide. To address this problem, we identified a complimentary concept, called the architectural perspective [15], to provide an architect with practical guidance as to how to ensure that their system exhibits the right set of quality properties. This paper reviews the idea of the architectural perspective and relates a specific experience of applying them to the architectural definition of an enterprise integration project for a financial markets organisation, explaining the strengths and weaknesses we found in the approach.