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.