“Technical Briefing: Agentic Software Engineering: A Roadmap to Software Engineering 3.0” was a 90-minute session in the Tutorials and Technical Briefings track of ICSE 2026, which ran from 12 to 18 April 2026 in Rio de Janeiro. The briefing took place on 15 April 2026 from 16:00 to 17:30 (conference time, GMT-03:00) in the room Oceania III.
Its abstract frames software engineering as shifting from AI-assisted development, which it calls SE 2.0, to agentic software engineering, or Software Engineering 3.0 (SE 3.0), in which autonomous AI agents act as collaborators, and states the briefing’s aim as establishing the foundations of a disciplined SE 3.0 practice.
Overview
The abstract names three bodies of work the briefing synthesizes: a large-scale characterization of agent activity in the wild based on the AIDev dataset; an empirical study of 567 Claude Code pull requests across 157 open-source software projects; and the Structured Agentic Software Engineering (SASE) (SASE) framework, which it describes as reframing actors, processes, artifacts and tools. It promises attendees evidence-backed mental models, evaluation patterns for agent-authored pull requests, and a practical vocabulary for designing trustworthy human-agent workflows, giving the Agent Command Environment (ACE) and the Agent Execution Environment (AEE) as examples of that vocabulary.
The programme lists nine presenters from Queen’s University, the Centre for Software Excellence and the Waterloo Research Center at Huawei Canada, Concordia University and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, with Paris Avgeriou of the University of Groningen and Uirá Kulesza of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte as session chairs.