Preface

Architectural representations of systems have shown to be effective in assisting the understanding of broader system concerns by abstracting away from details of the system. The dependability of systems is defined as the reliance that can justifiably be placed on the service the system delivers. Dependability has become an important aspect of computer systems since everyday life increasingly depends on software. Although there is a large body of research in dependability, architectural level reasoning about dependability is only just emerging as an important theme in software engineering. This is due to the fact that dependability concerns are usually left until too late in the process of development. In addition, the complexity of emerging applications and the trend of building trustworthy systems from existing, untrustworthy components are urging dependability concerns be considered at the architectural level. Hence the questions that the software architecture and dependability communities are currently facing: what are the architectural principles involved in building dependable systems? How should these architectures be evaluated? By bringing together researchers from both the software architectures and the dependability communities, this workshop makes contributions from dependability more visible within the software engineering community and vice-versa, thus helping to build strong collaboration possibilities among the participants. The workshop provides software engineers with systematic and disciplined approaches for building dependable systems, as well as allows further dissemination of the state of the art methods and techniques. During ICSE 2002 we organized the first workshop, which was a succes