Designing 2025

2nd International Workshop on Designing Software

Software design is a set of activities and decisions that are involved in the construction of a software system, ranging from high-level architecture and conceptual design to code design. Decisions made during a design process have long-lasting impact on various qualities of a system, such as modularity, maintainability, scalability, robustness, security, usability, and performance. Despite its important role in software development, design is a subject that is still relatively little understood by both researchers and engineers – particularly in terms of design as an activity rather than design as a product/outcome. Although exceptions exist, in practice, design is frequently carried out in a somewhat ad-hoc, implicit manner. Teams often succeed in some way, though not always. Collectively, the research community has to date little systematic understanding of what makes certain designs and design processes successful, how to package and transfer knowledge about design and designing between teams and organizations, and how to design systems that are robust against a continuously evolving context. Teaching software design also remains a challenge for educators, with design being considered a skill that is acquired mainly through experience rather than something that can be taught in classrooms.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and educators who are interested in any aspect of software design, though we hope to place a specific focus on designing software as an activity in which developers, teams, and organizations engage. The workshop seeks to identify new directions and open challenges for the field. The workshop will be highly interactive and discussion-based, centered around a core set of topics on software design research and education. Each session will begin with short presentations by participants on a topic and proceed with breakout sessions to discuss the topic in depth. The outcome of the workshop is expected to be a report summarizing open problems, promising approaches, and next steps for advancing the state-of-the-art in software design practices and education.

Previous Editions

Designing 2024

Call for Papers

We invite submissions in the following categories:

• Position papers on visions or new directions for software design (max. 4 pages)
• Research papers presenting novel contributions on software design (max. 8 pages)
• Case study papers describing a case study or a model problem that can be used by the community to compare and evaluate different approaches to design (max. 6 pages)
• Education papers that discuss novel techniques for teaching design and designing (max. 8 pages)
• Proposals for a workshop activity outlining a specific activity (1 to 1.5 hours long) to be carried out together with attendees, such as workshopping a new design method, debugging classroom challenges, or discussing ways to bridge the gap between academia and industry (max. 2 pages). The proposal must include (1) the objective(s) of the activity and expected outcome, (2) a high-level outline of the activity (e.g., a list of questions to be discussed by the participants), and (3) a plan for engaging possibly a large number (30~40) of participants (e.g., breakout groups).

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Empirical studies on software design
• Cognitive and social aspects of software design
• Designing software in hybrid and remote settings
• Impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on software design; the role of design in AI-assisted software development
• Processes and evaluation standards for software design research
• Software design methodologies, principles, strategies, and patterns
• Case studies of design successes and failures
• Model problems to illustrate design challenges and support comparison of techniques and educational use
• Approaches for software design education, including pedagogies, curriculum development, and case studies
• AI-assisted software design education
• Theory building for/of software design
• Software design for social dimensions (e.g., ethics, sustainability, privacy)
• Software design for emerging domains (e.g., cyber-physical systems, IoT)
• Rigorous approaches to software design (e.g., modeling and validation)

Submission Guidelines

Contributions should be submitted through the HotCRP site.

All submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines. Submissions will undergo a single-blind review process, and do not need to be anonymized.

Submissions will undergo a single-blind process and be evaluated based on (1) relevance to the workshop and potential to generate stimulating discussions, (2) novelty (for research, education and position papers), and (3) presentation quality.