Agentic AI for Software Development: Autonomous Agents in Requirements Engineering, Testing, and Deployment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63282/3050-922X.AECTIC-118Keywords:
Agentic AI, Requirements Engineering, Software Testing, Deployment Automation, Large Language Models, Multi-Agent Systems, DevOps, GitOps, Canary Releases, Mutation Testing, Traceability, Reflexive Critique, Policy-as-Code, Autonomous Software Agents, Progressive DeliveryAbstract
The maturation of agentic AI (autonomous large language model (LLM) agents with planning, tool-use, and memory) is a sea change in software engineering. In contrast to the earlier, AI-guided tools that just presented static suggestions or local completions, AGI AI possesses the capability of goal-directed multi-step reasoning across the entire SDLC. This is most obviously seen in three of the mission-critical applications: requirements engineering, testing, and deployment. Each of these stages has long been identified as an area of bottleneck or waste for software quality and delivery speed, and can be subject to inefficiency that autonomous agents can methodically diminish under suitable constraints and evaluation. Such an agentic AI can parse user stories, epics, and regulatory docs in RE, surfacing ambiguities, contradictions, and compliance risks proactively. By simulating a requester Analyst's position, such agents support the communication with stakeholders and suggest some useful clarification questions that are automatically proposed, with an eye on compliant rules to standards (e.g., SSTC 29148). This feature speeds up not only backlog refinement, but also traceability between requirements and test artifacts, as well as implementation units. In software testing, the benefits of independence are even clearer. Classical automatic testing techniques use fixed heuristics, or user-guided scenarios, whereas autonomic test generators can generate heterogeneous sets of unit, integration, and property-based test cases by iterating over the refinement of coverage goals. By combining fuzzing engines, mutation coverage, and continuous test adequacy feedback, agents can dynamically exercise system interfaces to visit boundary conditions and patch weak assertions that, in turn, lower defect leakage rates.
This is consistent with advances in an emerging trend---repository-level evaluation (e.g., SWE-bench, DevBench), where iterative reasoning and environment-aware feedback loops are again the key to success across settings against static baseline models. Lastly, in deployment and operations, agentic AI operates as a release manager and reliability engineer. And such autonomous agents or systems should help out when we roll – deploying new versions, watching the real-time observability data, and kicking off roll-back procedures when they see problems – in consideration of a progressive delivery approach (ie, canary or blue-green). Contrary to rule-based automation, agentic systems adjust rollout decisions based on changing telemetry patterns and serve policy-as-code checks for safety. They can also independently propose and document planned mitigation actions, incident traces, and coordinate advanced rollback windows that help to minimize MTTD (Mean Time To Detection) and MTTR across production failures. In this paper, we contribute a role-based multi-agent architecture designed for these three lifecycle pillars, as well as a method for robust integration using retrieval grounding, structured outputs, and reflexive critique, and we evaluate empirically over benchmark datasets and industrial microservices. Results show that there is a measurable improvement in ambiguity reduction in requirements of 42%, mutation score increase of 14% in testing, and rollback latency decrease of 37% with deployment without the requirement to accept an elevated change failure rate. Beyond the empirical gains, we have also shown socio-technical implications illustrating that there is a need for governance to support human-in-the-loop checks as well as open audit systems. Taken together, the results imply that agentic AI is not just an accelerant but a structural enabler that offers a dependable basis to reconcile autonomy and safety in contemporary software development pipelines.
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