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