This award is presented at each ICSA to the author(s) of the paper from the ICSA edition of 10 years ago that is judged to have had the greatest influence on software architecture research and practice since its original publication.
Each year a MIP committee (composed of 3 industrial members of the current program committee for ICSA, General Chair and Program Co-chairs) reviews the papers from ICSA n–10 and selects the paper they consider to have been the most influential paper during the past 10 years.
In particular, research impact is estimated based on number of citations. The top five papers with the highest citation numbers are submitted to the 3 industrial members of the MIP committee. Each member evaluates the five candidates for industrial impact, and uses 3 points to vote for the most supported one(s). Based on both indicators one recipient is selected.
The so-determined most influential papers are:
| Year | Title | Authors | DOI |
| 2023 (CBSE 2013) | DEECO: an ensemble-based component system | Tomas Bures, Ilias Gerostathopoulos, Petr Hnetynka, Jaroslav Keznikl, Michal Kit, Frantisek Plasil | 10.1145/2465449.2465462 |
| 2022 (WICSA/ECSA 2012) | In Search of a Metric for Managing Architectural Technical Debt | Robert L. Nord, Ipek Ozkaya, Philippe Kruchten, Marco Gonzalez-Rojas | 10.1109/WICSA-ECSA.212.17 |
| 2021 (QoSA 2011) | PerOpteryx: automated application of tactics in multi-objective software architecture optimization | Anne Koziolek, Heiko Koziolek, Ralf Reussner | 10.1145/2000259.2000267 |
| 2020 (QoSA 2010) | Evaluating Maintainability with Code Metrics for Model-to-Model Transformations | Lucia Kapová, Thomas Goldschmidt, Steffen Becker, Jörg Henss | 10.1007/978-3-642-13821-8_12 |
| 2019 (WICSA 2009) | Every Architecture Description Needs a Framework: Expressing Architecture Frameworks Using ISO/IEC 42010 | David Emery, Rich Hilliard | 10.1109/WICSA.2009.5290789 |
| 2018 (CBSE 2008) | A Component Model for Control-Intensive Distributed Embedded Systems | Séverine Sentilles, Aneta Vulgarakis, Tomáš Bureš, Jan Carlson and Ivica Crnković | 10.1007/978-3-540-87891-9_21 |
| 2017 (CBSE 2007) | A Modeling Approach to Analyze the Impact of Error Propagation on Reliability of Component-Based Systems | Vittorio Cortellessa and Vincenzo Grassi | 10.1007/978-3-540-73551-9_10 |
| 2016 (WICSA 2006) | Software Architecture as a Set of Architectural Design Decisions | Anton Jansen and Jan Bosch | 10.1109/WICSA.2005.61 |