The academic track welcomes researchers and studies in methods and practices of Agile software development, especially those around the main theme of XP 2026 on “Expanding Agile: Transforming Today, Shaping a Sustainable and Inclusive Tomorrow”

Topics of Interest

We invite research papers on, but not limited to, the following topics:

Leadership and Culture

    Leadership and coaching
    Human aspects, morale, values, ethics, and beliefs
    Diversity and Inclusion in Agile

Business Agility

    Business and enterprise agility
    Business and startups
    Software startups
    Global software development and offshoring
    Large-scale agile organizations

Data-driven Agility and Transformations

    Measurement and metrics for projects, processes, software, and teams
    Qualitative/quantitative improvement techniques
    Tools and techniques for Agile and Lean development

Engineering

    Agile Architectures
    Test-driven Development, Pair Programming, and Refactoring
    Development and operations (DevOps)
    Testing, release management, and deployment
    Continuous engineering and automation
    Engineering and management

Product and Design

    Requirements gathering
    User experience and user research
    Product management and product ownership

Education and Training

    Teaching experiences
    Empirical studies with students

Emerging Topics

    Agility for regulated AI systems
    Agile ML Engineering
    RegOps
    Agile for safety-critical systems
    Sustainability for teams, products, development, business models, and management
    Games and game-based techniques

Studies and Evaluations

    Foundations and conceptual studies
    Systematic literature reviews/mappings, and rapid reviews
    Empirical studies using qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods
    Experiments and quasi-experiments
    Cross- and multi-disciplinary methods and studies
    Case studies, action research, ethnography, and field studies

Submissions based on empirical studies conducted under industry-academia collaboration are especially encouraged, sharing data/artifacts (anonymized and curated) to increase reproducibility, but not mandatory for submission or acceptance.