The IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) is the premier venue bringing together practitioners and researchers working in the areas of software architecture, component-based software engineering, and quality aspects of complex software systems. The 20th IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2023) continues the tradition of a working conference, where researchers and software architects together discuss day-to-day challenges of software architects and co-define the future of the field with the broad software architecture community. Interactive working sessions are used to identify synergies and collaboration opportunities – and to co-develop the innovative software architecture solutions of the future.

Following decades of technological advances, software and software-controlled systems play an essential role in every aspect of our lives. With this great power comes great responsibility for those architecting these systems. We are responsible for ensuring that the software systems used in domains as diverse as education, healthcare, commerce and government provide everyone with the functionality required for a full participation in the economic, social, political and cultural life of the society in which they live. We are responsible for delivering software systems capable of improving the terms of participation in society, in particular for those at risk of being left behind. In recognition of these responsibilities, the theme of ICSA 2023 is ‘Software Architecture for an Inclusive Society’. We are soliciting papers describing novel research on techniques, methodologies, tools and practices for the development, validation and verification, and maintenance of software architectures capable of enabling and enhancing social inclusion in the application domains in which they are used.

We call 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 of interest for the conference include (but are not limited to) the following themes:

    Architecture evaluation and quality aspects of software architectures
    Model-driven engineering for architecture
    Component-based software engineering
    Automatic extraction and generation of software architecture descriptions
    Refactoring and evolving architecture design decisions and solutions
    Architecture frameworks and architecture description languages
    Linking architecture to requirements and/or implementation
    Architecture conformance
    Reusable architectural solutions and software architecture knowledge management
    AI/ML techniques for architecture
    Architecture & continuous integration/delivery, and DevOps
    Agile architecting, continuous architecting, and other approaches to architecting
    Training, soft skills, coaching, mentoring, education, and certification of software architects
    Stakeholder management and collaborating with other business and technical domains
    State-of-the-art and state-of-practice in software architecture
    Microservices, containerization, serverless platforms, and event-driven architectures
    Architecture for legacy systems and systems integration
    Architecting families of products
    Architecture for specific types of systems, such as:
        Edge / Fog / IoT systems / IoB systems
        AI / ML systems
        Cyber-physical systems
        Systems using blockchain
        Quantum computing
        Self-adaptive systems
        Autonomous systems
    Theme-related topics:
        Architecture for equality, diversity and inclusion
        Cultural, ethics, economic, business, financial, social, and managerial aspects of architecture
        Roles and responsibilities for software architects