Software Engineering Governance: Foundations for Trustworthy Automated Software Engineering

Abstract

Automated software engineering is progressively evolving from supporting human engineers to actively performing engineering activities through AI assistants, autonomous agents, automated testing, vulnerability repair, and deployment pipelines. As automation becomes an active participant in the software lifecycle, trustworthiness concerns extend beyond software systems themselves to the engineering processes, organisational decisions, and automated actors involved in their development. This evolution elevates Software Engineering Governance from a supporting organisational activity to a central engineering concern. The established challenge of translating normative trustworthiness principles into operational practice becomes particularly consequential when automated systems perform engineering activities directly. Software Engineering Governance provides an engineering perspective for connecting these domains by interpreting trustworthiness principles within organisational and regulatory contexts, establishing operational lifecycle artefacts that guide automated execution, and providing the basis for interpreting the operational evidence generated during execution in subsequent accountable evaluation. Viewing trustworthy automation through this governance perspective reveals two complementary governance responsibilities. Before automated execution, trustworthiness objectives must be systematically operationalised into lifecycle artefacts that guide or constrain engineering behaviour. After execution, operational evidence must be interpreted to support the accountable evaluation of observed engineering behaviour. Their combination provides the organising perspective through which Software Engineering Governance relates governance decisions made before execution to the evidence available for evaluation afterwards