A Research Agenda on Agents and Software Engineering: Outcomes from the Rio A2SE Seminar
Davide Taibi, Henry Muccini, Karthik Vaidhyanathan, Marcos Kalinowski, Michele Albano + 13 more
TLDR
This paper outlines a community-driven research agenda for agents and software engineering, covering six key thematic areas identified by experts.
Key contributions
- Organized the A2SE seminar with 18 experts to discuss agentic AI's impact on software engineering.
- Identified six thematic areas: Governance, SE for Agents, Agents for Software Architecture, Quality, Sustainability, and Code.
- Prioritized short-term and long-term research directions within each thematic area.
- Provides a structured foundation for coordinating future research efforts in this critical field.
Why it matters
Agentic AI is rapidly transforming software engineering, both as a tool and as a complex system requiring new SE practices. This paper offers a crucial, expert-driven research agenda to guide the community, helping coordinate efforts at this critical juncture.
Original Abstract
The rise of agentic AI is reshaping software engineering in two intertwined directions: agents are increasingly applied to support software engineering tasks, and Agentic AI systems themselves are complex systems that require re-thinking currently established software engineering practices. To chart a coherent research agenda covering the two directions, we organized the A2SE seminar in Rio de Janeiro, bringing together 18 experts from academia and industry. Through structured presentations, collaborative topic clustering, and focused group discussions, participants identified six thematic areas: Governance, Software Engineering for Agents, Agents for Software Architecture, Quality and Evaluation, Sustainability, and Code, and they prioritized short-term and long-term research directions for each. This paper presents the resulting community-driven, opinionated research agenda, offering the SE community a structured foundation for coordinating efforts at this critical juncture.
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