Test whether Responsibility Topology adds explanatory power beyond team size and system scale

Determine whether the distinction between single-center and multi-anchor Responsibility Topologies predicts differences in acceptance latency, assurance, continuity, or related engineering outcomes after controlling for team size, system size, domain, and risk.

Background

Responsibility Topology classifies organizations according to the distribution of independent residual-risk acceptance authority rather than by human headcount, agent count, or the number of execution cells.

The paper treats the construct as an empirical claim requiring comparison of single-anchor and multi-anchor systems. The unresolved question is whether topology explains measurable engineering differences once conventional covariates such as team size and system scale are taken into account.

References

As of the freeze date, the most important open questions for this framework remain empirical: whether Responsibility Topology adds explanatory power beyond team size, whether Minimum Sufficient Specification can be identified in practice, whether Context Invalidation reduces stale-context failures, and whether Accepted-TC-centered accounting improves measurement of agentic software work.

— Software Engineering in the Agent Era From Trustworthy Change to Human Agent Software Organizations  (2609.04630 - Wang et al., 4 Sep 2026) in Section 10.3, final paragraph; Section 11.1, Proposition P6; Section 11.4