Our paper “Describing Agentic AI Systems with C4: Lessons from Industry Projects” has been accepted at ICSA 2026

The paper “Describing Agentic AI Systems with C4: Lessons from Industry Projects” by Andreas Rausch and Stefan Wittek has been accepted at ICSA 2026, the 23^rd IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture. 

The International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) is the premier venue for practitioners and researchers interested in software architecture, in component-based software engineering and in quality aspects of software and how these relate to the design of software architectures.

ICSA has a strong tradition as a working conference (previously named Working International Conference on Software Architecture, WICSA), where researchers meet practitioners and software architects can explain the problems they face in their day-to-day work and try to influence the future of the field.

ICSA 2026 is scheduled to be held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands, between the 22nd and the 26th of June 2026. Check out more about the history and past series of ICSA at https://icsa-conferences.org/series/history

Different domains foster different architectural styles -- and thus different documentation practices (e.g., state-based models for behavioral control vs. ER-style models for information structures). Agentic AI systems exhibit another characteristic style: specialized agents collaborate by exchanging artifacts, invoking external tools, and coordinating via recurring interaction patterns and quality gates. As these systems evolve into long-lived industrial solutions, documentation must capture these style-defining concerns rather than relying on ad-hoc code sketches or pipeline drawings. This paper reports industrial experience from joint projects and derives a documentation systematics tailored to this style. Concretely, we provide (i) a style-oriented modeling vocabulary and a small set of views for agents, artifacts, tools, and their coordination patterns, (ii) a hierarchical description technique aligned with C4 to structure these views across abstraction levels, and (iii) industrial examples with lessons learned that demonstrate how the approach yields transparent, maintainable architecture documentation supporting sustained evolution.

The full paper can be read at https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15021