As software systems become ubiquitous, the issues of dependability become more and more crucial. Given that solutions to these issues must be considered from the very beginning of the design process, it is reasonable that dependability is addressed at the architectural level. This book was born of an effort to bring together the research communities of software architectures and dependability.

This state-of-the-art survey contains expanded and peer-reviewed papers based on the carefully selected contributions to two workshops: the Workshop on Architecting Dependable Systems (WADS 2007), organized at the 2007 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2007), held in Edinburgh, UK in June 2007 and the Third Workshop on the Role of Software Architecture for Testing and Analysis (ROSATEA 2007) organized as part of a federated conference on Component-Based Software Engineering and Software Architecture (CompArch 2007), held in Medford, MA, USA in July 2007. It also contains a number of invited papers written by recognized experts in the area. The 14 papers are organized in topical sections on critical infrastructures, rigorous design/fault tolerance, and verification and validation.