Continuing the long tradition of the European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA), the doctoral symposium at ECSA 2021 offered PhD students a unique opportunity to receive feedback on their research projects in the broad field of software architecture. The symposium accepted submission from PhD students at both early and advanced stages of their doctoral research. The students were encouraged to present their research settings, goals, methods, (preliminary) results, and a critical reflection on their work, by interacting closely with established researchers in their specific areas. Despite the logistical challenges faced due to the COVID-19 pandemic that significantly affected the organization of this year's conference and transformed it into a virtual event, the symposium enabled the students to disseminate their research and obtain constructive feedback on their current results and future research plans. Every submission was reviewed by three members of the Program Committee. The evaluation was based on technical quality of the submission, including clarity, adequacy of the problem tackled, position to related work, self-contained solution description, expected results and evaluation plan, the overall quality, originality of the submission, the novelty of the research approach, and relevance to ECSA 2021. For this edition, we received high-quality submissions, and after a thorough review process, eight papers were accepted for presentation at the symposium. Professor Paola Inverardi gave an inspiring keynote talk entitled 'On the Axiom of Software Architecture Existence' that was equally appreciated by the PhD students and the senior ECSA attendees. We thank the ECSA Organizing Committee for their continuous support with the planning and running of the symposium. We are grateful to the members of the Doctoral Symposium Program Committee for evaluating the submissions and guiding the next generation of researchers in the field of software architecture in their initial steps as research professionals. We thank the PhD students who submitted papers to the symposium, and who actively participated in discussing their research projects at the event. We also express our appreciation to the keynote speaker for accepting our invitation, and for her thought-provoking keynote talk. These contributions from across our community led to an engaging symposium, which provided constructive feedback and new input to the PhD students, and continued to develop a spirit of collaborative research within the software architecture community.
Doctoral Symposium Chairs Doctoral Symposium Program Committee