Research PapersXP 2026

Call for submission

The academic track welcomes researchers and studies in methods and practices of Agile software development, especially those around the main theme of XP 2026 on “Expanding Agile: Transforming Today, Shaping a Sustainable and Inclusive Tomorrow”

Topics of Interest

We invite research papers on, but not limited to, the following topics:

Leadership and Culture

• Leadership and coaching
• Human aspects, morale, values, ethics, and beliefs
• Diversity and Inclusion in Agile

Business Agility

• Business and enterprise agility
• Business and startups
• Software startups
• Global software development and offshoring
• Large-scale agile organizations

Data-driven Agility and Transformations

• Measurement and metrics for projects, processes, software, and teams
• Qualitative/quantitative improvement techniques
• Tools and techniques for Agile and Lean development

Engineering

• Agile Architectures
• Test-driven Development, Pair Programming, and Refactoring
• Development and operations (DevOps)
• Testing, release management, and deployment
• Continuous engineering and automation
• Engineering and management

Product and Design

• Requirements gathering
• User experience and user research
• Product management and product ownership

Education and Training

• Teaching experiences
• Empirical studies with students

Emerging Topics

• Agility for regulated AI systems
• Agile ML Engineering
• RegOps
• Agile for safety-critical systems
• Sustainability for teams, products, development, business models, and management
• Games and game-based techniques

Studies and Evaluations

• Foundations and conceptual studies
• Systematic literature reviews/mappings, and rapid reviews
• Empirical studies using qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods
• Experiments and quasi-experiments
• Cross- and multi-disciplinary methods and studies
• Case studies, action research, ethnography, and field studies

Submissions based on empirical studies conducted under industry-academia collaboration are especially encouraged, sharing data/artifacts (anonymized and curated) to increase reproducibility, but not mandatory for submission or acceptance.

Submissions

We invite submissions of unpublished high-quality research papers, both full papers (max. 15 pages) and short papers (max. 8 pages), related to Agile software development.

• Full papers should present completed research that addresses a research problem and document the details and results of a study.
• Short papers are expected to communicate emerging research results and/or trends that have the potential to be further developed.

Papers may also present a vision on a given topic that addresses long-term challenges and opportunities that are thoroughly justified or related to prior literature. We welcome submissions addressing topics across the full spectrum of Agile software development, broadly on Agile, and on issues of concern to researchers or practitioners (or both).

Submit here: (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=xp2026)

Note: The conference is earlier in 2026 (April 8–11, 2026), so the deadlines have been adjusted to reflect this.

Formatting

All submissions must be formatted according to the Springer LNCS/LNBIP conference proceedings template (for LaTeX and Word), available here.

Review Criteria

The XP 2026 main conference proceedings will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) as Open Access.

Submissions will be screened on rigor and relevance and then evaluated by at least three program committee members based on soundness, significance, novelty, verifiability, and presentation quality.

Springer asks that peer reviewers NOT upload manuscripts into generative AI tools. If any part of the evaluation of the claims made in the manuscript was in any way supported by an AI tool, they ask peer reviewers to declare the use of such tools transparently in the peer review report.

XP 2026 adopts a Single-Blind Review process: authors are unaware of the reviewers’ identities, while reviewers know the authors. This means that you don’t need to anonymize the authors and affiliations in the paper.

Questions?

Contact our academic track chairs:

• Tiago Silva da Silva, Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), Brazil (email: silva.tiago@unifesp.br).
• Eva-Maria Schön, University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer, Germany (email: eva-maria.schoen@hs-emden-leer.de) .