Engineering Requirements for Generative AI Agents: The BARD Process Theory

Overview & Synopsis

How teams engineer requirements for systems built around Generative AI (GenAI) Agents remains empirically uncharted. Existing Requirements Engineering (RE) research mainly addresses AI and ML-based systems broadly but provides no process account for agentic systems, whose non-deterministic behavior cannot be anticipated at design time. To understand how teams actually proceed, we applied Socio-Technical Grounded Theory across 36 semi-structured interviews with practitioners, interleaving data collection and analysis so that emerging findings drove our theoretical sampling and shaped successive rounds of coding. The result is Behavioral Agent Requirement Discovery (BARD), the process theory of RE for GenAI Agents. BARD holds that requirements are not fixed up front but discovered through a recurring cycle of four activities: teams scope the need, build the agent, observe its behavior, and revise what they ask for. Through this four-phase loop, the requirement evolves from a fixed specification towards behavioral and evaluation criteria. Four tensions drive transitions between phases, and two conditions frame the loop. BARD provides researchers with a framework for iteratively refining RE workflows, while giving practitioners a structured basis to embed into their development processes.