Many software organizations are in the process of moving from project-centric to architecture centric engineering of software. The two typical reasons for this move are (1) the architecture allows for a clear break-down in parts whereas a project-centric approach easily leads to a monolithic system and (2) the organization is interested in exploiting the commonalities between its products or systems. This tutorial addresses this development by providing an overview and in depth treatment of the issues around architecture-centric engineering of software. Topics include software architecture design in the presence of existing components and infrastructure (top-down versus bottom-up), architecture evalua-tion and assessment, software artefact variability management, software product lines and the role of the software architect. These topics are, in addition to the technical perspective, discussed from process and organizational viewpoints. The topics are extensively illus-trated by examples and experiences from many industrial cases.

It is assumed that the participant has some experience with industrial software develop-ment.

The expected audience can be divided into two categories. First, software engineers and technical managers considering the introduction of architecture-centric software develop-ment and evolution. Second, researchers interested in the experiences collected by the tutorial presenter and his research group and the reflections made based on the experiences.

Prof. dr. ir. Jan Bosch is a professor of software engineering at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where he heads the software engineering research group. He received a MSc degree from the University of Twente, The Netherlands, and a PhD degree from Lund University, Sweden. His research activities include software architecture design, software product lines, object-oriented frameworks and component-oriented programming. He is the author of a book "Design and Use of Software Architectures: Adopting and Evolving a Product Line Approach" published by Pearson Education (Addison-Wesley & ACM Press), (co)editor of three volumes in the Springer LNCS series and has (co)authored more than 50 refereed journal and conference publications. He has organized numerous workshops, served on many programme committees, including the ICSR'6, CSMR'2000, ECBS'2000, GCSE, SPLC and TOOLS conferences and is member of the steering groups of the GCSE and WICSA conferences. He is the PC co-chair of the 3rd IFIP (IEEE) Working Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA-3).