Briefing Engineering (BriefingEng) is one of the structured engineering activities proposed in Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research Roadmap as part of Structured Agentic Software Engineering (SASE) (SASE). The paper frames it as the activity through which an engineer’s primary creative output shifts from implementation logic to the articulation of unambiguous intent and guidance, building on decades of work from the Requirements Engineering and Agile/Scrum communities rather than reinventing them. Its stated purpose is to move beyond the common failure pattern of pasting a raw, vague ticket and expecting an agent to produce good results, instead treating the mission brief as a first-class artifact.
Usage
The paper assigns Briefing Engineering to the human Agent Coach, performed within the Agent Command Environment (ACE) (ACE), where AI assistance can help the coach author high-quality briefs by flagging ambiguity, surfacing edge cases, ensuring logical consistency, and generating property-based acceptance tests. Its artifact is the BriefingScript. The paper’s research roadmap for this activity calls for languages and schemas that express goals, constraints, invariants, domain context, and acceptance criteria without forcing premature design decisions; AI-powered authoring and review assistants that steer engineers toward property-based acceptance criteria rather than brittle examples; and traceability from generated code and evidence back to the briefing clauses that motivated them, which the paper says becomes especially important when a coach must compare and justify choices across multiple agent-generated alternatives (N-version programming).
Related Terms
BriefingScript, Structured Agentic Software Engineering (SASE), Product Requirement Prompt (PRP)