The IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2020) is the premier gathering of practitioners and researchers interested in software architecture, in component-based software engineering and in quality aspects of complex software systems.

ICSA continues the tradition of a working conference, where researchers meet practitioners and where software architects can explain the problems they face in their day-to-day work and try to influence the future of the field. Interactive working sessions will be the place where researchers meet practitioners to identify opportunities to create the future.

A software system’s architecture comprises the principal design decisions employed in the system’s construction and evolution. It is the primary determinant of the system’s key properties. Put simply, software systems “live and die” by their architectures. Hugely successful software solutions (e.g., the well known client-server, peer-to-peer, and map-reduce systems, and even the Web itself) are successful because of their architectures first and foremost. Although every system has an architecture, the architectures of many systems are not explicitly documented; instead those architectures are reflected (actually, hidden) in the systems’ implementations, posing significant challenges to studying the architecture of real-world software systems in a systematic, empirical fashion. The theme of ICSA 2020 is “Empirical Software Architecture Research”; we call on both researchers and practitioners for contributions that advance our understanding of architectures in real-world software, facilitate empirical research by making architectural artifacts and tools available publicly, and promote replicability of results through common datasets and benchmarks.

We welcome original papers that explore and explain the role of architecture in current systems and future systems. This conference looks at what can be learned from our software architecture history, experience, studies, and best practices.

Topics of interest for the conference include (but are not limited to) the following themes:
* Architecture & CI, CD, DevOps
* Microservices
* Model driven engineering for continuous architecting
* Up-front architecture and agile development
* Architecting Systems of Systems, IoT systems, CPSs, software ecosystems, self-adaptive systems, or autonomous systems
* Component based software engineering and architecture design
* Architecture evaluation and quality aspects of software architectures
* Automatic extraction and generation of software architecture descriptions
* Re-factoring and evolving architecture design decisions and solutions
* Architecture frameworks and architecture description languages
* Linking architecture to requirements and/or implementation
* Preserving architecture quality throughout the system lifetime
* Reusable architectural solutions
* Software architecture knowledge management
* Software architecture for legacy systems and systems integration
* Architecting families of products
* Cultural, economic, business and managerial aspects of software architecture
* Software architects roles and responsibilities
* Training, education, and certification of software architects
* State-of-the-art and state-of-practice in software architecture
* Industrial experiments and case studies