Dear ECSA 2026 participants, workshop participants, and ESOCC colleagues,
Welcome to Bolzano and to the ECSA 2026 conference week, including the 20th European Conference on Software Architecture, ESOCC, the doctoral symposium, and our co-located workshops and tutorials. The image at the top of our conference page shows a cityscape of Bolzano created with AI: familiar landmarks, mountains, and cable cars, reimagined through a generative lens. It is a fitting starting point for this year’s program. Software architecture is also being reimagined: by AI, by new forms of automation, and by the practical demands of building dependable systems in a changing world.
Several contributions explore this direction directly, including work on AI assistance for architectural decision making, LLM-based architecture recovery, multi-agent support for software architecture design, AI-supported generation of architectural models, and studies on whether LLMs can extract design decisions or turn design discussions into architectural tests. Our two ECSA keynotes also speak directly to this moment: Enrico Zimuel will trace the evolution of software architecture toward trustworthy human-AI ecosystems, while Gabriele Mazzini will offer a firsthand account of the origin and evolution of the EU AI Act and its balance between regulation and innovation. At the same time, ECSA 2026 remains much broader than AI. The program brings together research and practice on cloud operations and Kubernetes, edge and cyber-physical systems, robotics, microservices, architecture evaluation and technical debt, MLOps and sustainability, security, blockchain, XR, local-first systems, tools, demos, doctoral work, registered reports, workshops, and industrial experience.
We hope the week gives you space to present your work, discover unexpected connections across events, and continue the conversations that make this community strong. Thank you for joining us in Bolzano. We are very happy to welcome you to ECSA 2026.
Alessandro, Ana, Andrea, Barbara, Davide, Francesca, Karthik, Klervie, Markus, Matteo, Moritz, Nicolás, Patricia, Ralf, Roberta, Romina, Ruoyu, Sashko, Tomas, Valentina, Vinicius, Xiaozhou.