Patricia Lago – författare

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology, QUATIC 2024, held in Pisa, Italy, during September 11–13, 2024.

The 34 full and short papers of QUATIC 2024 included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions.

QUATIC is a forum for disseminating advanced methods, techniques and tools to support quality approaches to ICT engineering and management. Practitioners and researchers are encouraged to exchange ideas and approaches on how to adopt a quality culture in ICT process and product improvement and to provide practical studies in varying contexts. 

A software architecture manifests the major early design decisions, which determine the system’s development, deployment and evolution. Thus, making better architectural decisions is one of the large challenges in software engineering. Software architecture knowledge management is about capturing practical experience and translating it into generalized architectural knowledge, and using this knowledge in the communication with stakeholders during all phases of the software lifecycle.

This book presents a concise description of knowledge management in the software architecture discipline. It explains the importance of sound knowledge management practices for improving software architecture processes and products, and makes clear the role of knowledge management in software architecture and software development processes. It presents many approaches that are in use in software companies today, approaches that have been used in other domains, and approaches under development in academia. After an initial introduction by the editors, the contributions are grouped in three parts on "Architecture Knowledge Management", "Strategies and Approaches for Managing Architectural Knowledge", and "Tools and Techniques for Managing Architectural Knowledge".

The presentation aims at information technology and software engineering professionals, in particular software architects and software architecture researchers. For the industrial audience, the book gives a broad and concise understanding of the importance of knowledge management for improving software architecture process and building capabilities in designing and evaluating better architectures for their mission- and business-critical systems. For researchers, the book will help to understand the applications of various knowledge management approaches in an industrial setting and to identify research challenges and opportunities.

Why have a book about the relation between requirements and software architecture? Understanding the relation between requirements and architecture is important because the requirements, be they explicit or implicit, represent the function, whereas the architecture determines the form. While changes to a set of requirements may impact on the realization of the architecture, choices made for an architectural solution may impact on requirements, e.g., in terms of revising functional or non-functional requirements that cannot actually be met.

Although research in both requirements engineering and software architecture is quite active, it is in their combination that understanding is most needed and actively sought. Presenting the current state of the art is the purpose of this book. The editors have divided the contributions into four parts: Part 1 “Theoretical Underpinnings and Reviews” addresses the issue of requirements change management in architectural design through traceability and reasoning. Part 2 “Tools and Techniques” presents approaches, tools, and techniques for bridging the gap between software requirements and architecture. Part 3 “Industrial Case Studies” then reports industrial experiences, while part 4 on “Emerging Issues” details advanced topics such as synthesizing architecture from requirements or the role of middleware in architecting for non-functional requirements. The final chapter is a conclusions chapter identifying key contributions and outstanding areas for future research and improvement of practice.