The IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) is the premier gathering of practitioners and researchers interested in software architecture, component-based software engineering, and quality aspects of complex software systems. The 23rd IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2026) continues the tradition of a working conference, where practitioners and researchers meet and where software architects can explain the challenges they face and try to influence the future of the field. Interactive working sessions will be the place where researchers meet practitioners to identify opportunities to create the future.

Software engineering is undergoing a rapid transformation: AI is becoming more intimately involved with supporting software development activities, including improving developer-written code, reviewing changes, and even writing entirely new code. In such an environment, the importance of software design becomes more predominant. Furthermore, 2026 marks 30 years since Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline was published, and so it is timely to reflect on how the legacy of software architecture knowledge can rise to meet this new world. Therefore, the theme of ICSA 2026 is Architecting in Continuous Software Engineering: Evolving Roles, Enduring Principles.

ICSA 2026 innovative contributions that explore the opportunities and challenges presented by these advancements. We seek papers that propose new methodologies, tools, and best practices for integrating intelligent systems into software architecture. Additionally, we welcome case studies highlighting both successful and unsuccessful applications of these technologies, providing valuable insights into their practical implications and potential pitfalls.

Besides the main theme, we call on both researchers and practitioners for contributions that advance our understanding of architectures in real-world software, facilitate empirical research by making architectural artifacts and tools publicly available, and promote replicability of results through common datasets and benchmarks. We welcome original papers that explore and explain the role of architecture in current systems and future systems. This conference looks at what can be learned from our software architecture history, experience, studies, and best practices.

Topics

Topics of interest for the conference include (but are not limited to) the following:

    Requirements & Architecture
        Stakeholder management and collaborating with other domains
        Linking architecture to requirements and/or implementation
        Methods to address the intertwining of specification and design
        Sustainability, ethics, business, financial, and managerial aspects of software architecture
    Architecture Design
        Model-driven architecture
        Component-based software engineering
        Architecture frameworks and architecture description languages
        Reusable architectural solutions & architecture knowledge management
    Cloud-native Computing & Architecture
        Microservices & containerization
        Serverless platforms & novel forms of virtualization
        Event-driven architectures
        Observability & Distributed Tracing
    Architecture Evaluation
        Evaluating quality aspects (e.g., security, performance, reliability, evolvability)
        Architecture conformance checking
        Lightweight evaluation methods
        New and emerging quality attributes, tactics for addressing them, and methods to analyze them, including for energy consumption and environmental impact measurement and assessment
    Architecture & its life-cycle
        Automatic extraction and generation of software architecture descriptions
        Architecture & continuous integration/delivery, and DevOps
        Refactoring and evolving architecture design decisions and solutions
        Agile architecting, continuous architecting, and other approaches to architecting
    Architecture & Architects
        Roles and responsibilities for software architects
        Training, soft skills, coaching, mentoring, education, and certification
        Architecture for equality, diversity and inclusion
        State-of-the-art and state-of-practice in software architecture
    Architecture for specific types of systems
        Edge / Fog / Internet of Things (IoT) systems / IoB systems
        AI / ML systems & systems using blockchains
        Cyber-physical systems
        Self-adaptive & autonomous systems
    Architecture & Generative AI
        Design assistance & identification of architectural patterns
        Decision making support, comparing technologies, evaluating trade-offs
        Generating source code to facilitate implementing architecture designs
        Reviewing designs, identifying inconsistencies, and suggesting improvements
        Using architecture principles as a way to guide agentic- and vibe-coding