2nd International Workshop on Low-Code Development and Software Architecture (LArc 2026)

The emerging paradigm of Low-Code (LC)/No-Code (NC) software development is a promising avenue to counter the currently dire shortage of skilled software developers. LC/NC approaches hinge on some kind of models and some kind of direct ”checkability“ of those models in order to ensure properties of the resulting artefacts. Because they use models, it is in principle possible to formalize the “language” of various flavours of LC and NC. Because these languages are abstract, very often graphical, and tend to be domain-specific, they resonate well with domains experts who are not able to code and do not intend to become skilled in programming in order to do their (non-programmer) jobs. A number of researchers and practitioners say that LC/NC is not new, as many communities of research and practice have pushed in this direction for over five decades. However, none of them has succeeded. The LC/NC wave we are observing today seems to be steered by new actors coming from the practice, and in many respects reinventing wheels detached from the ”culture“ and the advances in each of the above domains.

Specifically of interest here is the relationship between LC/NC approaches and software architectures. This relationship, however, comes with many questions. If architectures are more “under the hood”, to which extent do they still matter? And to whom do they matter? Will LC/NC development tools impose architectural choices or paradigms? To which extent is the quest for modularization and reusability inherent to the concept of components in component-based development, objects in object-oriented programming, services and microservices, in connection with the LC/NC paradigm?

This workshop intends to gather researchers and practitioners interested in:

• discussing the relationship between LC/NC and software architectures;
• exploring how software architecture issues are currently handled by low-code platforms;
• identifying the impact of low-code development to long-term software architecture;
• discussing the challenges of implementing software architecture tactics and design patterns in low-code development; and
• discussing the impact of low-code development on quality attributes.
• brainstorming new ideas around low-code development

Call for Papers

We solicit the submission of:

• Full papers (including industry experience papers), which should not exceed 8 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, references, appendices, etc.
• Short papers (including industry experience papers), which should not exceed 4 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, references, appendices, etc.
• Extended abstracts (including industry experience papers and position papers), which should not exceed 2 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, references, appendices, etc.

The topics of interest to the workshop include (but are not limited to):

• Architectural styles for low-code platforms
• Consistency between requirements and design in low-code platforms
• Low-code development and software design and modelling
• Low-code development platforms “as a service”
• Microservices for low-code development
• End-user software engineering and low-code architecture
• Specification and evaluation of quality aspects (e.g., security, performance, scalability, reliability, maintainability, deployability) in low-code platforms
• Graphical and textual domain-specific languages for low-code architecture
• Component-based development in low-code platforms
• Reuse in low-code development
• Visualisation of software architecture for low-code development
• Low-code architecture and continuous deployment
• Low-code development and reference architectures
• Low-code development and architectural documentation
• Low-code development and architectural erosion/debt
• Interoperability issues with low-code platforms
• Generative AI for low-code architecture/development
• Empirical studies on low-code development and software architecture
• New ideas on low-code development

All papers must be submitted electronically via the HotCRP submission system by the submission deadline. All submissions must be original work and must not have been previously published, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere. All submissions must be in PDF format and strictly conform, at time of submission, to the official “ACM Primary Article Template”, which can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) and anonymous (omitting author names) options. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:

\documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart}

All papers will go through a double-blind review process and will be reviewed on the basis of technical quality, relevance, contributions, and clarity by the program committee members. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register for the workshop and attend it in person to present the work. The workshop proceedings will be published by ACM in the ICSE 2026 Companion Proceedings. The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available by ACM. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2026. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. Extended abstracts are free of APC charges. ACM papers, excluding “extended abstracts”, need to have an OA institutional agreement or undergo article processing charges (APCs) to be paid by the authors (250 dollars for members, and 350 for non-members) in order to be published. It is not possible to pay for extra pages.