The European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) is the premier European conference dedicated to the field of software architecture, covering all architectural features of software engineering. It is the follow-up of a successful series of European workshops on software architecture held in the UK in 2004 (Springer LNCS 3047), Italy in 2005 (Springer LNCS 3527), and France in 2006 (Springer LNCS 4344). It evolved into a series of European conferences whose first edition was ECSA 2007, held in Madrid, Spain during September 24–26, 2007 (Springer LNCS 4758). This year’s conference was held at the beautiful Coral Beach Hotel and Resort near Paphos in Cyprus. As with the previous versions of the conference, ECSA 2008 (Springer LNCS 5292) provided an international forum for researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to present innovative research and to discuss a wide range of topics in the area of software architecture. It focused on formalisms, technologies, and processes for describing, verifying, validating, transforming, building, and evolving software systems. Covered topics included architecture modelling, architecture description languages, architectural aspects, architecture analysis, transformation and synthesis, architecture evolution, quality attributes, model-driven engineering, built-in testing and architecture-based support for component-based and service-oriented systems. The conference attracted paper submissions from 29 countries (Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, - land, Portugal, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, the UK, USA, and Venezuela).