A Research Agenda on Agents and Software Engineering: Outcomes from the Rio A2SE Seminar

2026-05-12

AI Summary

Agentic AI is transforming software engineering in two complementary directions: empowering development practices while simultaneously challenging traditional methodologies due to its inherent complexity, thereby necessitating a unified research agenda. This work addresses this dual challenge by organizing the Rio A2SE workshop, which brought together 18 experts from academia, industry, and research. Through structured reporting, collaborative clustering, and consensus-building techniques, the initiative establishes the first community-driven framework encompassing both “agent-augmented software engineering” and “software engineering for agents.” The resulting framework systematically identifies six core research areas—governance, agent software engineering, architecture, quality assurance, sustainability, and code—and articulates short- and long-term priorities, offering a foundational agenda to foster coordinated innovation across academic and industrial communities.

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.

Problem

• Agentic AI
• Software Engineering
• Research Agenda
• Intelligent Agents
• AI Systems

Innovation

• Agentic AI
• Software Engineering
• Research Agenda
• Intelligent Agents
• Community-driven