SAGE: Source-Aligned Governance for Human–Agent Requirements Clarification in Multi-agent Software Engineering

Abstract

Multi-agent large language model workflows are increasingly used in software engineering, yet requirements clarification under human–agent collaboration remains weakly governed. Much of the rework reflects requirement-chain desynchronization: negotiated intent, workflow contracts, and signed deliverables evolve on separate tracks without auditable linkage, yielding semantic drift and unclear accountability. Source-Aligned Governance and Evolution governs clarification via three co-evolving sources, a clarification–confirmation–sign-off path, three strategies for cross-source mapping, staged human sign-off, and cross-scenario reuse, and ten operational mechanisms—platform-agnostic rules that encode them as auditable transition constraints—implemented as declarative transition guards for multi-agent coordination. On a reference platform, the Product Requirement to Initial Demo and Build Scene scenarios supply a built-in thermal-power plant smart-overhaul sample for artifact-level verification of sign-off and rollback on requirements artifacts, plus in-organization trial reception. The online prototype extends prior agent pipelines with executable upstream requirements guards on bound requirement artifacts. The contribution is encodability and traceability of governance constraints, not causal effectiveness.