Doctoral SymposiumECSA 2026

Call For Papers

The goal of the Doctoral Symposium is to provide a supportive setting in which PhD students can present and receive feedback on their research. During the symposium, PhD students will interact closely with established researchers in the field, receive feedback on their research, and get advice on managing their research. The symposium will also help participants establish a network with their peers in the field of software architecture. The program will feature a keynote that will shed light on establishing yourself within the software architecture community and beyond.

The technical scope of the Doctoral Symposium is that of ECSA 2026, as represented by the topics in the main track topics. Besides, we particularly encourage submissions that demonstrate that diversity in gender, culture, religion, country, etc., is a key factor for success and innovation in software architecture.

We encourage submissions from PhD students at any stage of their research. Based on the submissions, the program committee will invite the PhD students to give presentations of their PhD research and to interact with senior as well as other junior researchers.

Types of Papers

To participate in the Doctoral Symposium, the contribution needs to be submitted by the submission deadline, consisting of two parts: a research summary paper and a letter of recommendation. The summary research paper should be authored by the student as a sole author.

The research summary paper (max 8 pages) should cover the following aspects:

• The research problem to be solved and its relevance in the software architecture field;
• A discussion of related work explaining why the research problem has not been solved yet;
• The scientific methods used to tackle the research problem;
• An outline of the proposed solution;
• The expected results;
• A plan for the evaluation of results;
• A critical reflection on the work, including open questions and challenges that the PhD student meets in his/her work, and that can be discussed with the senior colleagues.

The submitted paper will be evaluated by the Doctoral Symposium Program Committee, and the following selection criteria will be used:

• the originality of the proposed research, the novelty of the research approach, and relevance to ECSA;
• the quality of the submission, including clarity, precision, and adequacy of the problem statement and critical reflection of the work, about the PhD student’s study stage.

Review and Ethics Policy

All submitted papers will undergo a rigorous single-blind peer review process. Papers will be selected based on relevance, soundness, originality, and quality. All contributions must be original, not published, accepted, or submitted for publication elsewhere. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. Plagiarism checking will be conducted, and any paper reporting more than a 20% match with published work will be desk-rejected.

Submission

All contributions need to be written in English, must be original, not published, accepted, or submitted for publication elsewhere. If accepted, each contribution needs to be presented by the author who is registered at the conference.

All contributions must be formatted according to the Springer LNCS style. Contributions need to be submitted in PDF format via EasyChair to the ECSA 2026 Doctoral Symposium Track. Please select the “Doctoral Symposium Track” in EasyChair for your submission and click “Continue”.

Important Dates

• Abstract submission: April 24, 2026
• Paper submission: May 01, 2026
• Notification: June 05, 2026
• Camera-ready paper: June 22, 2026

All dates are 23:59h AoE (Anywhere on Earth).