A Research Roadmap for Augmenting Software Engineering Processes and Software Products with Generative AI
arXiv:2510.26275 · doi:10.1145/3788879
Abstract
Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly transforming software engineering (SE) practices, influencing how SE processes are executed, as well as how software systems are developed, operated, and evolved. This paper applies design science research to build a roadmap for GenAI-augmented SE. The process consists of three cycles that incrementally integrate multiple sources of evidence, including collaborative discussions from the FSE 2025 "Software Engineering 2030" workshop, rapid literature reviews, and external feedback sessions involving peers. McLuhan's tetrads were used as a conceptual instrument to systematically capture the transforming effects of GenAI on SE processes and software products. The resulting roadmap identifies four fundamental forms of GenAI augmentation in SE and systematically characterizes their related research challenges and opportunities. These insights are then consolidated into a set of future research directions. By grounding the roadmap in a rigorous multi-cycle process and cross-validating it among independent author teams and peers, the study provides a transparent and reproducible foundation for analyzing how GenAI affects SE processes, methods and tools, and for framing future research within this rapidly evolving area.
References in corpus (7)
- Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation
- The AI Ghostwriter Effect: When Users Do Not Perceive Ownership of AI-Generated Text But Self-Declare as Authors
- Generative AI for Self-Adaptive Systems: State of the Art and Research Roadmap
- The Future of AI-Driven Software Engineering
- CoPrompt: Supporting Prompt Sharing and Referring in Collaborative Natural Language Programming
- We Need a New Ethics for a World of AI Agents
- What do professional software developers need to know to succeed in an age of Artificial Intelligence?