Technical Track ECSA 2026

Call For Papers

The European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) is the premier European venue for software architecture, providing researchers, practitioners, and educators with a platform to present and discuss the latest, most innovative, and impactful findings and experiences in the field. The 20th edition of the conference (ECSA 2026) will be held from September 7 to 11, 2026, as an in-person event in the beautiful city of Bolzano, Italy.

For ECSA 2026, we do not choose a specific theme. We acknowledge a foundational truth: any software-intensive system requiring sound software engineering has an architecture, whether it is accidental or intentional. Accidental architectures lead to suboptimal digital solutions, with pervasive and often long-lasting negative consequences like costly maintenance, low quality properties, and resource overconsumption. In contrast, Intentional architectures result from sound design decisions and are the backbone of robust, scalable, resource-effective and sustainability-aware systems.

We invite contributions discussing software architecture principles and practices, emerging trends, and case studies highlighting strategic architectural choices that can lead to enhanced performance, improved collaboration, and long-term sustainability. At the same time, we value submissions that address negative results, complex problems experienced in practice, and well-argued positions or visions that contribute to constructive dialogue.

The overarching question is: how are software architecture principles and practices, both well-established and emerging, making an impact in real-world systems, shaping today’s society, and influencing the technologies of tomorrow? We welcome submissions that address this question across diverse domains, from enterprise systems to AI-enabled systems, cloud/edge systems, and autonomous applications.

We particularly encourage papers that highlight how diversity (in gender, culture, religion, geography, etc.) contributes to success and innovation in software architecture.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Foundational principles of software architecture
• Relationship of requirements engineering and software architecture
• Quality attributes and software architectures
• Architecture practices for secure, explainable, and trustworthy software
• Architecture design and analysis
• Architecture description languages and meta-models
• Architecture verification and validation
• Management of architectural knowledge, decisions, and rationale
• Architecture patterns, styles, perspectives and tactics; reference architectures
• Architecture viewpoints and views
• Architecture conformance
• Architecture quality evaluation
• Software architecture virtualization and visualization
• Architecture-centric process models and frameworks
• Software architecture and agile, incremental, iterative, and continuous development
• Component-based models and deployment; middleware
• Software architecture and system architecture
• Software tools and environments for architecture-centric software engineering
• Ethics, cultural, economic, business, social, human, and managerial aspects of software architecture
• Architecture and technical debt
• Architecting for sustainability-aware software-intensive systems
• Applying AI and LLMs in software architecture and architecting for AI and LLM intensive systems.
• Software architecture education
• Cross-disciplinary approaches to software architecture
• Architectures for reconfigurable and self-adaptive systems
• Architectural concerns of autonomic systems
• Software architecture applied to new and emerging areas, such as the cloud/edge, big data, blockchain, robotics, cyber-physical systems, IoT, autonomous systems, systems-of-systems, energy-aware software, quantum computing, AI-enabled systems
• Architectural strategies and variability management in software product lines
• Empirical studies, systematic literature reviews, and mapping studies in software architecture
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion in activities related to software architecture

Types of Papers

ECSA 2026 seeks four types of papers for the research track:

• Research papers (max. 16 pages in LNCS style) describing novel contributions to software architecture research (submissions should cover work that has a sound scientific/technological basis and has been validated)

• Education and training papers (max. 16 pages in LNCS style) addressing methodologies, experiences and best practices for teaching and training software architecture

• Experience reports (max. 16 pages in LNCS style) covering innovative implementations, novel applications, insightful performance results and experience in applying software architecture research advances to practical situations and systems

• Short papers (max. 8 pages in LNCS style) presenting novel and preliminary (positive or negative) results, or work-in-progress, or challenges in a topic of software architecture practice, research, education, and training. Submissions must have a sound basis, but not necessarily be validated.

Review and Ethics Policy

All submitted papers will undergo a rigorous double-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. Please note that research papers, education and training papers, and experience reports that are rejected in their categories may be re-evaluated as short papers, but only if the committee decides the work presents a preliminary version of a novel idea.

Open Science and Artifact Sharing

The research track of ECSA 2026 supports an Open Science policy. We encourage all contributing authors to disclose (anonymized and curated) data/artifacts to increase reproducibility. Note that sharing research artifacts is not mandatory for submission or acceptance. Upon submission to the research track, authors are required: To make their artifacts available to the program committee (via a link to an anonymous repository) and provide instructions on how to access this data in the paper; or To include in the paper an explanation as to why this is not possible or desirable; and To indicate why they do not intend to make their data or study materials publicly available upon acceptance, if that is the case. While sharing research artifacts is not mandatory, authors are required to include a “Data Availability” section immediately after the Conclusions. This section should explain whether anydata and/or artifacts are available, and if so, how they could be accessed. Upon acceptance, papers with Open Science artifacts (e.g., data, tools) will be invited to upload their artifacts into the ECSA Zenodo community. Sharing artifacts via the ECSA Zenodo community is required for authors to be eligible for the best Open Artifact award.

All the information are available at the ECSA 2026 Open Science Track page.

Submission Details

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

Publication and Journal Opportunity

The proceedings will be published by Springer as part of the LNCS series. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their research to a special issue of the Journal of Systems and Software.

Important Dates

• Abstract submission: March 13, 2026
• Paper submission: March 20, 2026
• Notification: April 20, 2026
• Camera-ready paper: May 20, 2026

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