LASD@ISD'26

Motivation

While Agile and Lean software development have become mainstream in industry and a strong community has crystallized around this new way of thinking, successful adoption of these practices remains far from straightforward. Projects often require tailoring Agile methods to fit specific contexts, yet this process is complex due to the interdependent nature of practices in frameworks like Scrum. The pandemic-driven shift to remote and hybrid work has added new challenges, forcing formerly co-located teams to adapt their communication and collaboration methods. Organizations must now innovate beyond traditional Agile practices, which often lack explicit remote work guidelines, to maintain team effectiveness in virtual environments. Furthermore, the ongoing return-to-office debates and the stabilization of hybrid work models have created new research opportunities around optimizing Agile ceremonies and collaboration patterns for sustainable, distributed workforce configurations.

Scaling Agile to large, distributed, and multi-team projects continues to be a pressing challenge. While frameworks like SAFe, LeSS, and Nexus have emerged to address the challenges of scaling, their adoption is often fraught with difficulties. Organizations frequently report issues such as framework misalignment with company culture, disruptions to existing management structures, and the inability to fully implement all elements of predefined frameworks. These challenges underscore the urgent need for both practical guidance and theoretical research to support successful large-scale Agile transformations.

Simultaneously, the rapid evolution of technology is redefining the landscape of software development. Generative AI coding tools, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and emerging Agentic AI workflows, are fundamentally altering how developers approach coding, testing, debugging, refactoring, and documentation. Beyond core programming tasks, fine-tuned LLMs and AI Assistants have shown promise in supporting requirements discovery and specification as well as in user research activities. These advancements open exciting new research directions, prompting critical questions about how generative AI can be effectively integrated into Agile workflows, how it alters the skills required for junior developers, and how to ensure ethical and responsible use of AI in software development. The emergence of AI-powered autonomous coding agents and multi-agent systems presents new paradigms for human-AI collaboration within Agile teams, raising questions about pair programming with AI and the evolving role of developers as reviewers and orchestrators.

Topics of Interest

Submissions

We invite research papers in three categories: Full Papers (12 pages), Short Papers (8 pages), and Posters (4 pages). Authors have the option to add a single extra page at a supplementary cost (regardless of the submission category). Papers must be in English and present original, not already published research. Papers should be submitted in the PDF format using the ISD template.

Each submission will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. To facilitate the double-blind reviewing, authors are kindly requested to provide the paper WITHOUT any reference to any of the authors, including the authors' personal details, the acknowledgments section of the paper and any other reference that may disclose the authors' identity.

Important Dates

Program

TBA...

Track Chairs

• Przybyłek, Adam
  Ireland, University of Galway, adam.przybylek@gmail.com

• Schön, Eva-Maria
  Germany, University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer, eva-maria.schoen@hs-emden-leer.de

• Wang, Xiaofeng
  Italy, University of Bolzano, Xiaofeng.Wang@unibz.it

Program Commitee