Software Engineering in the Agent Era From Trustworthy Change to Human Agent Software Organizations
TL;DR
This work makes that authority an explicit classification axis and derive consequences for change state, shared engineering facts, verification, and flow control and makes that authority an explicit classification axis and derive consequences for change state, shared engineering facts, verification, and flow control.
Abstract
Software agents make digital execution elastic: repository analysis, code generation, testing, migration, tool use, and operations can be replicated and parallelized without proportional human headcount. Problem framing, semantic commitment, verification, integration, attention, and residual-risk acceptance remain bounded by human cognition, organizational authority, and economic capacity. How should scalable execution be governed so organizations can accept and sustain its changes? Our testable framework has two constructs and one execution abstraction. Trustworthy Change (TC) is the engineering object moving from intent through delegated execution, verification, integration, acceptance, and operation. Responsibility Topology classifies organizations by the distribution of independent residual-risk acceptance authority. A single-center topology has one final baseline responsibility anchor; a multi-anchor topology requires joint acceptance across independently governed domains. The Human-Agent Cell (HAC) produces candidates, proposals, and evidence; execution grants no acceptance authority. As execution and authority scale differently, distributed HACs create context-coherence and invalidation pressures, while multi-anchor governance adds joint acceptance and explicit responsibility closure. Responsibility, accountability, change management, specification, verification, and human oversight predate this work; our claim is only that agent-scaled execution changes how they fit together. We make that authority an explicit classification axis and derive consequences for change state, shared engineering facts, verification, and flow control. Progressive Specification and bounded-capacity analysis remain hypotheses to test, not laws. We contribute theory construction and operationalization; empirical validity remains open to controlled, longitudinal, and field studies.
