Our current society is heavily relies on complex software-intensive systems. Software drives critical business processes and controls safety-critical functionalities in embedded systems, such as cars or aircrafts. Current trends towards service-based systems, software virtualisation and cloud computing further increase the penetration of software in our everyday lives and its impact on our economies. Hence, the demand for reliable and trustworthy software increases. While software engineering principles significantly advanced our capabilities to create complex software-intensive systems, designing software that meets specific quality-of-service (QoS) attributes, such as requirements on its performance, availability, reliability and trustwortiness, is an open research challenge.

In order to facilitate the design of software systems satisfying given QoS attributes, the QoS requirements have to be precisely formulated. Once this has been done, the QoS characteristics of a service and cloud-based system can be modeled. This allows performing constructive quality assurance at design time to improve the QoS potential of the system. A common characteristic of modern service- and cloud-based systems is to use runtime adaptation to improve QoS attributes such that changing requirements and environment conditions have to be dealt with. In order to carry out reasonable adaptations, the fulfillment of QoS requirements has to be monitored and future potential QoS values have to be predicted. Based on these values, the best suitable adaptation can be selected to counter potential QoS threats.

The theme of the proposed GI-Dagstuhl seminar jointly addresses the problem of QoS specification, QoS modelling, QoS monitoring, QoS prediction, and QoS optimisation in a systematic way in order to tackle the challenges of ensuring QoS in modern service- and cloudbased systems.

The main goal of the GI seminar is to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as young PostDocs) in the areas of software and service engineering, software and systems modelling, quality assurance, quality prediction and run-time systems management to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations:

• The seminar shall provide an integrative nature for participants coming from different research backgrounds.
• The participants shall obtain feedback on their current research results.
• The participants shall learn about the newest developments in their own as well as adjacent research areas.
• The seminar should foster interaction among the participants and establish collaborations between the researchers towards joint research projects.