The 2nd Workshop on Explainable and Reliable Software Systems (EXPRESS 2026)

The contemporary software landscape is undergoing a profound transformation, driven by the convergence of artificial intelligence, cloud-native architectures, and continuous delivery. This evolution is giving rise to software systems of unprecedented scale, complexity, and autonomy. As a result, ensuring their correctness, interpretability, and trustworthiness has emerged as a central challenge for the software engineering community.

The workshop aims to advance the state of the art in software engineering by addressing these challenges head-on. The workshop will provide a dedicated forum for presenting and discussing novel concepts, methods, and tools that improve transparency, dependability, and usability throughout the entire software lifecycle—from design, specification, and verification to deployment, monitoring, and continuous evolution.

EXPRESS 2026 welcomes contributions that bridge theory and practice in making software systems more explainable and reliable, bringing together researchers and practitioners interested in rigorous foundations, practical techniques, and real-world experience reports.

Previous Edition

• EXPRESS 2025, Trondheim, Norway

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

The 2nd Workshop on Explainable and Reliable Software Systems (EXPRESS 2026)

Topics of Interest

We invite submissions on a broad range of topics related to explainable, dependable, and trustworthy software systems, including but not limited to:

• Dependability, safety, and reliability of software and agentic systems
• Analysis, testing, and (formal) verification techniques for trustworthy software
• Trustworthy AI for software systems, and software systems that enable trustworthy AI
• Interpretability and explainability of machine learning models and software systems
• Explainability of LLM-driven verification, testing, and analysis techniques
• Dependency and complexity discovery, analysis, and mining
• Software and systems visualization to enhance explainability
• Runtime observability, analysis, monitoring, and error recovery

Submission Guidelines

Submission Link: https://express26.hotcrp.com

All papers will be submitted via HotCRP and be reviewed in a double-blinded manner.

We welcome the following types of submissions:

• Work-in-progress papers (max. 4 pages): Early-stage, high-potential research that is not yet fully validated.
• Industry & tool papers (max. 4 pages): Practical challenges, experience reports, solutions, or tools supporting the industrial adoption of academic or emerging techniques.
• Full papers (max. 8 pages): Original, mature, and thoroughly evaluated research contributions.

Page limits exclude references; appendices are allowed and do not count towards the page limits. All submissions must be original and must not be under review or published elsewhere. Submission Format

• Submissions must be in English and in PDF format, adhering to the page limits above.
• Authors must use the ACM Primary Article Template available from the ACM Proceedings Template page.
  • Word users should use the Interim Template.
  • LaTeX users should follow the sample-sigconf.tex example and use the following document class declaration: \documentclass[sigconf,screen,review,anonymous]{acmart}

Proceedings

At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register for and attend EXPRESS 2026 to present their work.

Accepted full papers will be published. For work-in-progress and industry & tool papers, authors may opt out of formal ACM publication; choosing to have these papers appear only on the conference website does not preclude future publication in other journals or conferences.