Big Questions on Software Architecture: Report of the ICSE 2026 BoF on Software Architecture
Software Architecture (SA) is more important than ever, from the need to master the pervasive impact of technology in society and planet earth, to balancing the role of humans versus technology, flexibility versus chaos, economic convenience versus digital autonomy. Despite SA importance, we feel that the SA research community needs to reflect on what are the big questions that deserve scientific research, and what are instead technology trends or hypes. In this paper, we report the results of a community initiative aiming to identify and discuss the big questions in SA research. Organised in two sessions hosted in 2026 at the ICSE and ICSA conferences, respectively, this paper reports on the results collected during the first session, and looks forward to complementing them with the results of the second one. To be continued ...