# Scientific Program Info

The 18th International Software Quality Days (SWQD 2026) conference and tools fair is one of the largest software quality conferences in Europe. The conference is also one of the premier events fostering industry-academia collaboration. It includes a scientific program on research and industry experience, bringing together researchers and practitioners from business, industry, and academia working on quality assurance, quality management, and testing for software and information technology.

## Theme and Topics

High software and systems quality are critical success factors in engineering reliable and sustainable solutions that benefit users and customers. Quality must be understood in its broadest sense, encompassing product, process, and service quality with a wide range of different quality attributes and requirements as well as related quality assurance and management activities throughout all phases of software and systems development.

We welcome contributions about all topics related to software and systems quality, with particular interest — but not limited to — this year’s overall conference theme on "Software Architecture as Backbone of Software Quality".

- Quality management in software and systems engineering
- Methods and tools for constructive and analytical quality assurance
- Testing of software-intensive and AI-based systems
- Process improvement for development and testing
- Automation in quality assurance and testing
- Requirements engineering and management
- Software architecture and design
- Design for testability and integration testing strategies
- Continuous integration, deployment, and delivery (CI/CD)
- Software modernization and evolution
- Project and risk management
- Software product management
- Metrics and measurement for products, processes, projects
- Technical debt and quality degradation over time
- Quality assurance for distributed, scalable and cloud-native architectures
- Applications of AI and machine learning for software and systems quality
- Secure coding and security by design
- Case studies and experience reports on practical applications

## Publication Information

The main scientific program of SWQD 2026 conference accepts two types of submissions. In both categories, papers demonstrating practical relevance and evaluations in a practical setting will be preferred.

- Technical Research Papers: should describe novel and sound research on topics related to software and systems quality. They should describe an original contribution to the field or a significant improvement of an existing solution. Papers should also be clear about its contributions with respect to related work and to previous work by the authors. It must provide (empirical) validation of the proposed solution, e.g., a proof-of-concept, and sound arguments that the solution will scale to real-world problems. Results must be stated clearly so that others can further validate them in later research.

- Industrial Experience Papers: should describe significant observations, insights and experience about real-world applications related to software and systems quality. Papers should carefully identify and discuss important lessons learned so that other researchers and/or practitioners can benefit from this experience. Authors should clearly describe the real-world context (system, project, team/organization, applied tools and technologies, etc.) and provide empirical evidence supporting the experience and derived conclusions.

Evaluation: All submissions to the scientific program will be rigorously reviewed by at least three members of the international program committee on their scientific merit, practical relevance, and alignment with conference topics. Papers must contain original unpublished work that must not have been previously published or submitted for review elsewhere.

Best Paper Awards: The SWQD 2026 conference will provide best paper awards in both categories, i.e., technical research papers and industrial experience papers.

## Submission Instructions

Papers must be submitted in PDF format (selecting the category technical research or industrial experience) via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=swqd2026

The language of the scientific program is *English*. Submissions to the main scientific program must adhere to the *Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP)* format since accepted papers are planned to appear in the conference proceedings published in the research publication series Springer LNBIP (https://www.springer.com/series/7911).

Papers may be accepted as regular full or short papers.

- Full Papers: should be 15-20 pages (in Springer LNBIP proceedings format)
- Short Papers: should be 8-12 pages (in Springer LNBIP proceedings format)

Open Science: SWQD 2026 supports the principles of Open Science to promote transparency, reproducibility, and accessibility in research. All submissions are encouraged to include an *Availability of Research Artifacts* section at the end of the manuscript, providing links to open data, code, and tools. Authors should provide a replication package in an archival, citable repository (e.g., Zenodo) with clear license information and usage instructions. Preprints may be shared in a non-commercial repository (e.g., arXiv) under an appropriate license.

For inclusion in the proceedings, accepted papers must be personally presented at the Software Quality Days 2026 conference by one of the authors.
Note: The presenting author can participate free of charge at the conference. Additional authors/presenters can participate at a discounted fee.

## Organization and Committee

Program Co-Chairs
- Michael Dorner, Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH), Sweden
- Rudolf Ramler, Software Competence Center Hagenberg, Austria
- Dietmar Winkler, TU Wien & Austrian Center for Digital Production (CDP), Austria

The members of the Program Committee and the Steering Committee of the scientific program can be found at https://www.software-quality-days.com/en/conference/committee.