The mastering of software quality is recognized as a key issue in software engineering. Further, it is becoming increasingly important as software currently provides the software qualities of systems that people rely on. To this aim, myriads of proposals on software quality models and metrics have been promoted both by researchers and practitioners. In this context, one of the main issues is to manage the great of deal of interactions of any kind that emerge between software qualities.

Analyses of the interactions among software qualities have often found that optimizing on one quality will cause serious problems with others. As just one relevant example, one large project had an Integrated Product Team that optimized the system for Security. In doing so, it reduced its vulnerability profile by having a single-agent key distribution system and a single copy of the data base – only to have the Reliability engineers point on that these were system-critical single points of failure. The project’s Security-optimized architecture also created conflicts with the system’s Performance, Usability, and Modifiability. Of course, optimizing the system for Security had synergies with Reliability in having high levels of Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. All in all, development teams have to face such wicked situations and make critical solutions with limited schedule and budget.

The CSRSQ workshop has the goal of exploring the conflicts and synergies among Reliability, Security and other Qualities. As part of this general goal, the nature of software qualities themselves is also of interest. Last advancements in research and current state of the practice will be put together in order to better comprehend the forces behind these interactions.