What is an Enterprise Architect?
What does an Enterprise Architect (EA) do, what do they explicitly not do, and how is the role distinguished from Business Architect and Domain Architect roles, including what they own, what they gove…
How do platform engineering, InnerSource, and standard-core plus…
How do platform engineering, InnerSource, and standard-core plus local-extension operating models balance team autonomy with organisational standardisation, and which patterns most reliably preserve l…
How does local optimisation of team- and role-level tooling in knowledge work…
How does local optimisation of team- and role-level tooling in knowledge work reduce organisation-level throughput, and which interdependencies determine when local gains become global losses?
AI productivity, quality, and governance open questions
What empirical evidence can distinguish sustainable Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled software delivery gains from short-lived throughput effects and hidden quality or governance costs in productio…
TOGAF motivation architecture
What does The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF)'s motivation architecture say about the dependency chain from business driver to goal to requirement: does it specify validation rules, or only…
SRE: establishing SLOs as contractual capability boundaries
How do Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices establish what a system can safely do, expressed as a contractual boundary rather than an observed average: specifically, how are Service Level Obje…
ITIL capacity management
What does IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) capacity management specify as the measurement practice for establishing a platform capability baseline, and where does it rely on assertion rather than tele…
GORE: translating strategic intent to scoped delivery objectives
How does Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) handle the translation from strategic intent to scoped, time-bounded delivery objectives: what decomposition rules does it specify, and where do…
Goal specification: minimum schema and completeness validation
What properties must a Goal specification carry for an automated system to determine whether it is complete enough to act on -- specifically, what is the minimum schema, and what happens when fields a…
Model-based requirements engineering
Is there evidence from model-based requirements engineering on how scope changes to a Goal propagate to the constraint surface: specifically, does constraint re-enumeration happen automatically, or do…
Goal fragmentation: signals distinguishing salami-slicing from legitimate…
When a Goal is a fragment of a larger intent (salami-sliced deliberately or accidentally), what signals distinguish it from a legitimately scoped sub-goal?
Goal-constraint feedback
In control systems with feedback between goal definition and constraint measurement, what conditions cause the system to converge on a stable specification versus cycle without resolution, and what is…
Formal methods: specifying interdependent inputs for automated feasibility…
In formal specification methods (Z notation, Alloy, TLA+), how are systems with interdependent inputs specified so that an automated solver can determine feasibility without human arbitration at each…
Capability claim vs. production telemetry
When a team's capability claim conflicts with production telemetry, what arbitration mechanism produces a reliable baseline, and is there empirical evidence on which approach (telemetry override, stru…
Enterprise software pricing concessions, switching costs, and exit leverage
How do enterprise software vendors use upfront pricing concessions to increase switching costs over contract lifecycles, and what abstraction or architectural investment strategies demonstrably reduce…
How have software-development commit trends shifted across repository creation,…
What do high-quality longitudinal studies (2019–2026) show about directional shifts and current baseline ranges for repository creation rate, Lines of Code (LOC) velocity, rework share, project abando…
Q4: Decision rights that should move closer to execution
Which decisions about sequencing, scope, reliability, technical debt, local spend, and incident response must sit with delivery teams to reduce delay without losing control?
Q1: Dominant flow constraint in split-authority delivery systems
What is the dominant source of delay and instability in split-authority delivery systems: capacity shortage, dependency coupling, approval latency, funding gates, or fragmented decision rights?
A spl…
AI-first software ecology in large engineering organisations (2025-2030)
What operating model, architecture strategy, and governance practices best improve developer productivity with Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistance in large software organisations, while preserving…
LLM reasoning in mathematics and programming tasks
To what extent is the claim true that mathematics and programming are especially strong use cases for Large Language Models (LLMs) because both rely on formal symbolic languages that may align with mo…
Funding authority and delivery-risk accountability split
What governance and commercial structures best preserve delivery velocity, delivered quality, delivered risk control, delivery cost, and total cost of ownership when funding authority sits with a part…
Build vs improve tradeoff
Given constrained engineering capacity, how should organisations allocate effort between (1) building features within an existing system and (2) improving the system itself (tooling, process, architec…
What metrics beyond code acceptance rates best capture net organisational value…
What metrics beyond code acceptance rates and lines of code best capture net organisational value when Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding tools such as GitHub Copilot are adopted with productivity ma…
What principles and governance practices enable sustainable, high-quality…synthesis
What principles and governance practices, spanning harness design, task selection, human oversight, and open-source software (OSS) ecosystem health, enable sustainable, high-quality software developme…
What are the design tradeoffs of self-modifying, malleable Artificial…
What are the design tradeoffs, in capability, reliability, safety, and maintainability, between self-modifying agent architectures, where the agent can alter its own toolset, prompts, or extensions at…
What is the evidence for human oversight as an effective quality gate in…
What is the empirical evidence that human oversight, specifically the human bottleneck property of limited throughput and pain response, functions as an effective quality gate, meaning the control poi…
What criteria define tasks where Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding agents…
What empirically grounded criteria define the characteristics of software development tasks where Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding agents reliably add value, versus tasks where agent autonomy intro…
Ubiquitous Language in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-augmented development
How significantly does maintaining a living Ubiquitous Language (UL), in the Domain-Driven Design (DDD) sense of a shared, precise domain vocabulary used consistently in both code and conversation, im…
Test-Driven Development (TDD) and fast feedback loops in Artificial…
How does enforcing Test-Driven Development (TDD) with AI coding assistants, writing failing tests before asking the AI to implement, change the quality and stability of the AI output compared to "writ…
Strategic versus tactical roles in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-augmented…
In an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-augmented software team, what is the optimal division of labour between the human developer, who owns strategic design, interface definition, and architectural overs…
Software Engineering fundamentals and AI code generationsynthesis
Drawing on the planned seven-item research programme on Software Engineering (SE) fundamentals in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-augmented development, six completed primary items plus external anchors…
Grill-Me technique: iterative structured interviewing for human and Artificial…
How effectively does the "Grill Me" technique, relentless iterative structured interviewing of the human developer by the AI assistant to build a shared design concept before generating any code, redu…
Fundamentals-first versus specs-to-code
What empirical patterns emerge when comparing real-world software projects built with a strict fundamentals-first Artificial Intelligence (AI) workflow, structured alignment, modules with simple inter…
Deep modules in AI-augmented development
How much more effective is Artificial Intelligence (AI) at understanding, navigating, and correctly modifying a codebase composed of deep modules with simple interfaces versus one filled with many sha…
Artificial Intelligence code entropy and complexity
Does repeated Artificial Intelligence (AI) code generation without strong architectural guardrails demonstrably increase software entropy and complexity over time, as predicted by the entropy model de…
What is the strongest evidence-based argument that investing in software…
What is the strongest evidence-based argument - drawing on Yann LeCun's primary sources, the formal methods literature, the systems capability debt research already in this corpus, and empirical evide…
Coding AI Agent Skills Survey
What actively maintained, publicly available agent skills, prompt libraries, instructions files, and system prompts exist — from vendors such as Microsoft and from the Open Source Software (OSS) commu…
Intent Driven Development
What is Intent Driven Development (IDD) — as a methodology that moves past Test Driven Development (TDD) and Specification Driven Development (SDD) — and what context and concept layering mechanisms a…
Reliable Software in the LLM Era
What strategies and formal-methods tooling exist for maintaining software reliability in the Large Language Model (LLM) era, and what does the Quint formal specification language ecosystem - including…
Three disciplines, one answer
Software engineering (Fred Brooks, 1975), evolutionary psychology (Robin Dunbar, 1992), and graph
theory each independently arrive at the same structural limit: approximately 5 people for a
high-coord…
Emergent Patterns in Software Engineering Prompts and SDLC Guidance
What are the current and emergent best practices for crafting AI agent prompts and tooling guidance tailored to each phase of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) — covering discovery, requireme…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding assistant deployment outcomes
Which organisations have published or disclosed coherent AI strategies specifically targeting software engineering, what outcomes have they measured, and what does the trajectory from AI-assisted codi…
GitHub Specify, Ralph Loops, and Lisa Planning
What is "Specify" in the context of GitHub-integrated AI development workflows, how does the Ralph loop implement proof-driven development in practice, and what role does Lisa planning play in the spe…
Jevons Paradox: efficiency gains, demand rebound, and the falling cost of…
How does Jevons Paradox operate across different sectors historically, what are the conditions under which cost or efficiency improvements *do not* increase total demand, and what do current thinkers…