Wed, Dec 02 - Keynote: Markus Borg

Abstract

Agentic software development has taken the software industry by storm. At least in the parts of the world where developers are not turtling in their shells, waiting for it to pass. The storm is driving more code churn than anything we have seen before, and our engineering processes must adapt accordingly. Organizations that remain on the sidelines risk being steamrolled by competitors who token-force their way forward, breaking traditional moats as they go. On the other hand, mindlessly adopting agentic development at scale is a recipe for disaster: beware what may be the biggest technical and cognitive debt generator we have ever seen.

Where do we turn when a storm shakes our profession to its foundations? To the foundations of software engineering. Now is the time for discipline and process engineering. In this talk, we present two processes that we consider essential in the agentic era: (1) systematically uplifting code quality to levels at which coding agents can work efficiently and effectively, and (2) safeguarding that quality during continuous agent-driven software evolution. Together, these processes prepare codebases for agents while preventing agent-driven degradation. We conclude by situating these processes within a broader governance framework for the end-to-end software delivery flow, designed to harness agentic speed without surrendering engineering control.

Bio

Markus Borg is a senior researcher at the intersection of software engineering and applied artificial intelligence. He is a principal researcher at CodeScene and an adjunct lecturer at Lund University. Markus serves on the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering.