In today’s context, software engineering is deeply intertwined with planetary-scale infrastructure, data-driven decision-making, and autonomous services. This opens up previously unheard-of possibilities yet also surfaces unprecedented challenges that are difficult to predict, identify, and resolve. Responsible Software Engineering (RSE) calls for software teams to anticipate and continually negotiate these impacts by incorporating responsible practices throughout the software development process. We propose to focus on responsibility as a foundational building block of the software development process, as embedded as any design material or organizational practice. The workshop invites contributions that explore how responsibility is negotiated in day-to-day engineering work: from prompt engineering for AI tools and data workflows to incident response, product roadmapping, and decommissioning legacy systems. The program will mix research papers, experience reports, speculative design exercises, and vision statements. We aim to conduct an interactive workshop where participants will co-create artifacts such as responsibility playbooks/templates, design patterns, and “failure postcards”. Our ambition is to move beyond identifying problems towards concrete practices that teams can adopt to make their software more accountable, reparable, and attentive to the communities and environments it affects.

Aims and Objectives 

This workshop aims to explore and promote the understanding of responsibility in the software engineering domain, comprising software design, processes, and products. Besides identifying responsible roles, we seek to explore best practices, methods, and frameworks through which Responsibility can be understood and transferred in the software engineering world, as well as elements that integrate Responsibility throughout the software development life cycle. The intended objectives of the workshop can be summarized as follows:

1. To explore, define, and operationalize the notion of Responsibility across all stages of software engineering

2. To explore how Responsibility manifests and evolves across diverse technological and societal contexts.

3. To offer opportunities for researchers to discuss future research aspects of Responsibility.

These objectives shall be supported in the workshop through the following actions:

• Working sessions to discuss topics and apply the emerging ideas to case studies and empirical evaluation.

• Provision of a platform for educators, researchers, and practitioners to present their current work and stimulate discussion.

• Support for group work and discussion on newly favored topics.

• Kickstart new collaborations between the workshop participants.

• Co-creation and publication of a roadmap on responsibility in software engineering.

• Dissemination of the workshop ideas and results at the main conference.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

1. 1. 1. Responsibility as a continuous lifecycle practice (beyond ethics at design time).

      2. Responsible AI-assisted development, including the use of LLMs in coding, code review, testing, and documentation.

      3. Responsible experimentation and A/B testing at scale (e.g., consent, rollout strategies, guardrails, and kill switches).

      4. Responsibility in platform and ecosystem engineering (APIs, plugins, marketplaces, open-source communities).

      5. Incident response, forensic analysis, and repair as sites of learning and accountability in software teams.

      6. Data-centric responsibility: data collection, curation, labeling, retention, and deletion in software pipelines.

      7. Responsibility and infrastructure choices (cloud regions, energy profiles, edge vs. centralized computing).

      8. Tools and infrastructures that embed responsibility checks in everyday work (e.g., responsibility-aware linters, CI checks, decision logs).

      9. Narratives and imaginaries of responsible software futures (speculative design, design fiction, scenario-based methods).

      10. Pedagogical innovations for teaching responsible engineering from the first line of code (studios, living labs, interdisciplinary courses).

      11. Governance structures and new roles (e.g., responsibility champions, ethics leads, sustainability engineers) in software teams and organizations.