Object-oriented architectural evolution

Software Architecture has become an established area of study within the software engineering community for a considerable time now. Recently, Software Architecture has become a topic of interest within the object-oriented community as well. The quality of an object-oriented architecture can be described by a set of characteristics, such as modularity, extensibility, flexibility adaptability, understandability, testability and reusability, which are recognized to facilitate the evolution and the maintenance of software systems. Architecture represents the highest level of design decisions about a system and evolution aspects have to be considered at this level. Moreover, the ever-changing world makes evolvability a strong quality requirement for the majority of software architectures. The main objective of this workshop was to establish a working dialogue about the effective use of techniques, formalisms and tools, as well as their combinations in order to address the architectural evolution of object oriented software systems, either in their initial development or in their later redesign. The workshop also did aim to highlight outstanding issues that should form a part of the forthcoming research agenda in the evolvability of object-oriented software architectures.