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

TL;DR

This paper presents a community-driven research agenda on agents and software engineering, highlighting six key thematic areas and outlining future research directions to guide the field's development.

Contribution

It introduces a structured, community-driven research agenda based on expert discussions, focusing on critical themes in agentic AI and software engineering.

Findings

Identified six key thematic areas for research.

Prioritized short-term and long-term research directions.

Provided a structured foundation for future efforts in the field.

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.