Many of today's large-scale software projects in the area of distributed systems and especially enterprise IT adopt service-oriented software architecture design patterns and enabling technologies. For these projects, availability of sound software engineering principles, methodology and tool support is of utmost importance. However, traditional software engineering approaches are not fully appropriate for the development of service-oriented applications. The limitations of traditional methods in the context of service-oriented computing have led to the emergence of Software Service Engineering (SSE) as a specialist discipline, but research in this area is still ongoing and many open issues remain. There is a need for research community and industry practitioners to develop comprehensive engineering principles, methodologies and tool support for the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) for service-oriented applications. The WESOA 2011 workshop is the seventh in a series of workshops that focus on the specific aspects of SSE.

The theme of this edition of the WESOA workshop, aligned with the ICSOC 2011 focus on Cloud Computing, is exploration of the synergies between SSE, Cloud Computing and Service Mashups. In particular, with the lack of concrete SSE methodologies and approaches the future focus of combining SSE, Cloud Computing and Service Mashups is as exciting as it is potentially dangerous. There are risks of providing end-users with powerful compositional tools to create new service-based applications without rigorous engineering control mechanisms. This area provides a strong candidate for future research for quality assurance in SSE. We especially encourage papers that address the combination of these topic areas.

Our aim is to facilitate exchange and evolution of ideas on SSE topics across multiple disciplines as well as to encourage participation of both researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. In particular, such collaboration shall be fostered by means of a highly interactive and fast-paced workshop format with invited speakers. We also intend to hold a discussion panel on the theme of the workshop to encourage ideas for future research.