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 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2024) 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.

Recent advances in capabilities and availability of generative artificial intelligence (AI) now allow users to generate text, source code, graphics, videos, and 3D models based on natural language descriptions. Software architects are already starting to use these tools to rationalize design decisions, to explore technology options, to synthesize source code based on patterns, and to generate architecture diagrams. The theme of ICSA 2024 is thus “Software Architecture in the Age of Generative AI”. The conference welcomes contributions exploring the potentials and risks of this new technology for software architecture. We are particularly interested in soliciting papers describing novel tools, techniques, and methods to support software architects using generative AI. We are also looking for software and system architecture case studies that successfully or unsuccessfully applied this new technology.

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
        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 (WASM, MicroVMs, etc.)
        Event-driven architectures
        Observability & Distributed Tracing
    Architecture Evaluation
        Evaluating quality aspects (e.g., security, performance, reliability, evolvability)
        AI/ML techniques for architecture
        Architecture conformance checking
        Lightweight evaluation methods
    Architecture & 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, such as:
        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