Actively-used software must be upgraded continuously to ensure its utility and safety. However, recent studies and a large body of anecdotal evidence suggest that, in practice, software upgrades are failure-prone and can lead to outages, data corruption or latent errors. These problems create a significant burden for organizations due to the associated downtime and high administrative costs.

We aim to leverage and expand on the success of HotSWUp I (organized at OOPSLA'08), which featured four research-paper tracks and focus-group discussions and attracted a large and diverse audience. This year, we propose a workshop aiming to identify cutting-edge research ideas for implementing software upgrades, based on synergies among the domains of software engineering, programming languages and systems, and to foster inter-disciplinary discussions and collaboration. We solicit position papers, from both academic researchers and industry practitioners, presenting novel techniques and providing empirical evidence related to the practical implementation of software upgrades.