In recent years, SoSyM has had a pretty large pipeline of papers to be published. This resulted in long hard copy publication turnaround times for accepted SoSyM papers. In order to facilitate more timely publication of accepted papers, we requested Springer to increase the number of pages per issue. Springer agreed to significantly increase the number of pages per issue for 2014. Specifically, they agreed to increase the number of pages in the first two issues of 2014 to 448 pages, and the last two issues of 2014 to 304 pages. Springer is also looking at increasing the number of pages published in 2015 to further reduce the pipeline. We are very grateful to the Springer staff for their willingness to take concrete steps to reduce the publication pipeline.

1 Contents of this issue

This issue contains nine papers in the Theme Issues on The Quality of Software Architectures. For a description of these papers, see the editorial provided by the editors of the Theme Issue.

Also contained in this issue is an Expert’s Voice by Marian Petre that is a lively response to the discussions that her paper “UML in Practice” presented at ICSE 2013 generated.

The issue also contains four regular papers.

The paper titled “Colouring: Execution, Debug and Analysis of QVT-Relations Transformations through Coloured Petri Nets” is authored by Esther Guerra and Juan de Lara. This paper presents a semantics for QVT-R via a compilation into Coloured Petri Nets.

The paper titled “Effects of Stability on Model Composition Effort: An Exploratory Study” is authored by Kleinner Farias, Alessandro Garcia, and Carlos Lucena. This paper presents a study that explores whether stability of models in the context of software evolution can be used as an indicator of the potential to produce inconsistent results when models are composed.

The paper titled “Mapping feature models onto domain models: Ensuring consistency of configured domain models” is authored by Thomas Buchmann and Bernhard Westfechtel. This paper presents an approach to model-driven software product line engineering that is based on domain and feature models.

The paper titled “Transformation challenges: From software models to performance models” is authored by Murray Woodside, Dorina Petriu, José Merseguer, Dorin Petriu, and Mohammad Alhaj. This paper addresses the problem of bridging the semantic gap that exists between software models expressed in UML models that use the MARTE profile and performance models based on queuing networks or Petri Nets.