The Q-ImPrESS project aims at bringing service orientation to critical software systems, such as industrial production control, telecommunication and critical enterprise applications. All these domains share a need for guaranteed end-to-end quality of service, but also a need to evolve over their long lifetimes. The Q-ImPrESS project targets this challenge by providing a method to allow developers, users and maintainers to foresee the impact of design decisions and evolutionary changes to the system not only on its overall quality of service, but also on its internal quality properties such as maintainability. Therefore, a new service architecture meta-model is developed which is accompanied by tool-supported model-driven quality of service prediction approaches and automated quality assessment. The consortium bundles outstanding European research groups on the field of quality assessment and prediction together with leading case study providers and agile and highly innovative SMEs which guarantee practicability, sustainability and open dissemination of the results.