Building European Software Architecture Community: How Far Have We Come?

This is the title of an introduction of the guest editors to a special theme of an upcoming journal of Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM). This special theme carries four papers which are an extended and revised versions of the papers published in 4th edition of European Conference of Software Architecture (ECSA 2010) which was hosted by the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. This introduction of the special theme has been authored by my colleagues Ian Gorton, Flavio Oquendo, and myself. A pre-print of this article is available here. Apart from providing sneak preview of all the four articles of this special theme, this article also indicates some of the key contributions to the development of the software architecture discipline in general and in Europe in particular. We also highlight the areas where software architecture research will be heading in the near future. The article included in this special theme present unique and practical solutions to quite pressuring challenges in the software architecture area. It took us more than 2 years to bring out this special theme and we really hope that it would make important contribution to a growing body of knowledge about software architecture. Comments and thoughts are welcome via emails.