CALL FOR PAPERS

The IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) is the premier gathering of practitioners and researchers interested in software architecture, component-based software engineering, and quality aspects of complex software systems. The 23rd IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2026) continues the tradition of a working conference, where practitioners and researchers meet and where software architects can explain the challenges they face 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.

Software engineering is undergoing a rapid transformation: AI is becoming more intimately involved with supporting software development activities, including improving developer-written code, reviewing changes, and even writing entirely new code. In such an environment, the importance of software design becomes more predominant. Furthermore, 2026 marks 30 years since Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline was published, and so it is timely to reflect on how the legacy of software architecture knowledge can rise to meet this new world. Therefore, the theme of ICSA 2026 is Architecting in Continuous Software Engineering: Evolving Roles, Enduring Principles.

ICSA 2026 innovative contributions that explore the opportunities and challenges presented by these advancements. We seek papers that propose new methodologies, tools, and best practices for integrating intelligent systems into software architecture. Additionally, we welcome case studies highlighting both successful and unsuccessful applications of these technologies, providing valuable insights into their practical implications and potential pitfalls.

Besides the main theme, 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 publicly available, 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

Topics of interest for the conference include (but are not limited to) the following:

Requirements & Architecture
- Stakeholder management and collaborating with other domains
- Linking architecture to requirements and/or implementation
- Methods to address the intertwining of specification and design
- Sustainability, ethics, business, financial, and managerial aspects of software architecture

Architecture Design
- Model-driven architecture
- Component-based software engineering
- Architecture frameworks and architecture description languages
- Reusable architectural solutions & architecture knowledge management

Cloud-native Computing & Architecture
- Microservices & containerization
- Serverless platforms & novel forms of virtualization
- Event-driven architectures
- Observability & Distributed Tracing

Architecture Evaluation
- Evaluating quality aspects (e.g., security, performance, reliability, evolvability)
- Architecture conformance checking
- Lightweight evaluation methods
- New and emerging quality attributes, tactics for addressing them, and methods to analyze them, including for energy consumption and environmental impact measurement and assessment

Architecture & its life-cycle
- Automatic extraction and generation of software architecture descriptions
- Architecture & continuous integration/delivery, and DevOps
- Refactoring and evolving architecture design decisions and solutions
- Agile architecting, continuous architecting, and other approaches to architecting

Architecture & Architects
- Roles and responsibilities for software architects
- Training, soft skills, coaching, mentoring, education, and certification
- Architecture for equality, diversity and inclusion
- State-of-the-art and state-of-practice in software architecture

Architecture for specific types of systems
- Edge / Fog / Internet of Things (IoT) systems / IoB systems
- AI / ML systems & systems using blockchains
- Cyber-physical systems
- Self-adaptive & autonomous systems

Architecture & Generative AI
- Design assistance & identification of architectural patterns
- Decision making support, comparing technologies, evaluating trade-offs
- Generating source code to facilitate implementing architecture designs
- Reviewing designs, identifying inconsistencies, and suggesting improvements
- Using architecture principles as a way to guide agentic- and vibe-coding


OPEN SCIENCE PRINCIPLES

The ICSA conference encourages authors of research papers to follow the principles of transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. In particular, the conference supports the adoption of open data and open source principles and encourages authors to disclose data in order to increase reproducibility and replicability. For ICSA 2026 it is expected that accepted research papers are accompanied by an artifact that will be evaluated in the Artifacts Evaluation track. For submission of research papers, authors are expected to submit an anonymized draft of the artifact that paper reviewers can use to help evaluate the research contributions. If authors are unable to submit an artifact draft, they are asked to comment in their submitted paper on why this is not possible, practical, or desirable. Possible reasons may involve privacy restrictions and/or non-disclosure agreements.

Accepted research papers with artifacts must then follow the artifact submission guidelines and deadlines mentioned in Artifacts Evaluation track.

For anonymizing the draft of the artifact, we recommend https://anonymous.4open.science/. The draft of the artefact does not have to be executable. The later artefact submission does not have to be anonymized.


SUBMISSION

We solicit the submission of technical research papers that describe original and significant results of theoretical, empirical, conceptual, or experimental work in software architecture. The submissions will be evaluated based on novelty, soundness, significance/relevance, open science principles (as outlined above), and presentation quality, in that order. All submissions must conform to the IEEE paper formatting and submission instructions and must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Two additional pages containing only references are permitted. The submissions must conform to the author instructions as well as to the IEEE Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Generated Text. Any submission that does not comply with these guidelines may be desk-rejected without further review.

Please note that ICSA 2026 will pursue a double-blind review process for technical research papers only, therefore all technical research paper submissions have to fulfill the double-blind reviewing requirements. Submissions that disregard these review requirements will be desk-rejected without review. For artifacts that will be published following the open science principles (see above), we ask that authors undertake reasonable, possibly non-exhaustive steps to not disclose their identity, e.g., by anonymizing author names, handles, affiliations, and URLs. The leakage of information in additional artifacts will not lead to desk rejection.

Reviewers will be asked to treat artifacts and papers as confidential. Changes to the list of authors are not permitted after submission. Track chairs are not allowed to submit papers to the track they are chairing.

All papers are to be submitted electronically via the EasyChair submission system by the submission deadline and must not have been published before or be submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration at ICSA. All submissions will be checked with an anti-plagiarism tool. Submissions found to contain plagiarized content may be desk rejected without further review.


PUBLICATION

All accepted technical research papers will be published in the ICSA 2026 main proceedings and appear in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

The authors of submissions that are rejected as technical research papers – but for which reviews show a strong potential for positively influencing the state of the art or state of practice in software architecture, or strong potential to stimulate discussion – may be invited to submit a short paper (up to 8 pages including references) or a poster (poster presented at the conference + up to 4 pages (including references) describing their research. Short papers and poster summaries (up to 4 pages) will be published in the ICSA 2026 companion proceedings.

Note that at least one author of an accepted contribution is required to register and present the work at the conference. An in-person presentation is required.


IMPORTANT DATES

Abstracts: Fri 28 Nov 2025
Paper submissions: Fri 5 Dec 2025
Acceptance Notification: Fri 6 Feb 2026
Camera-ready: Fri 6 Mar 2026



OTHER TRACKS AND SUBMISSION DEADLINES

Research Papers: Fri 5 Dec 2025
Software Architecture in Practice: Fri 5 Dec 2025
Working Sessions: Fri 13 Feb 2026
Workshops: Fri 13 Feb 2026
Posters: Fri 13 Feb 2026
New and Emerging Ideas: Fri 13 Feb 2026
Journal First: Fri 13 Feb 2026
Tutorials/Tech Briefings: Fri 13 Feb 2026
Early Career: Fri 13 Feb 2026
Artifacts Evaluation: Fri 13 Feb 2026



WEBSITE: https://conf.researchr.org/home/icsa-2026