evidence-registry FE-BND-2026-07-28-SOURCES
Framework Engineering Boundary Source Registry
Source registry
Method
Sources were selected after the research question, candidate explanations, comparison dimensions, comparators, and decision rules were frozen. Priority was given to current standards, standards bodies, official professional bodies, and original peer-reviewed research. An abstract or landing page is identified as such. Source presence and scope are evidence of overlap or institutional maturity, not proof that FE is useful or unnecessary.
Registered sources
| Evidence ID | Source and access | Directly supported use | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| EV-FEB-001 | ABET, Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs, 2026–2027 | Engineering programs require outcomes, curriculum, faculty, resources, and continuous improvement; discipline-specific program criteria add topical and faculty expectations. Systems criteria cover holistic lifecycle design and analysis. | Accreditation criteria, not a universal theory of discipline formation. |
| EV-FEB-002 | INCOSE, About Systems Engineering | Systems engineering is transdisciplinary, integrative, and lifecycle-oriented; its objects can include conceptual systems such as legal frameworks and financial models. | Professional-body description rather than a controlled empirical study. |
| EV-FEB-003 | INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook | Systems engineering has a maintained handbook covering concepts, lifecycle processes, methods, tailoring, and practice. | Landing-page evidence; full handbook content was not treated as openly inspected. |
| EV-FEB-004 | ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2023 | Defines a common system-lifecycle process framework from conception through retirement and allows organizations to define, control, and improve processes without prescribing a specific method or model. | Public abstract/metadata, not the paywalled normative text. |
| EV-FEB-005 | SEBoK v2.14 | Demonstrates a governed, community-maintained body of tested, proven, and emerging systems-engineering knowledge. | Body-of-knowledge scope is broad and partly descriptive. |
| EV-FEB-006 | ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2022 | Separates an entity's architecture from its architecture description and standardizes concerns, viewpoints, model kinds, and frameworks across multiple entity types. | Public abstract/metadata only. |
| EV-FEB-007 | ISO/IEC/IEEE 15289:2019 | Specifies purposes and content of lifecycle information items, supporting documented traceability and controlled engineering information. | Public abstract/metadata only. |
| EV-FEB-008 | Brinkkemper, “Method Engineering,” 1996 | Defines method engineering around constructing methods and tools and situational methods tuned to a project's situation. | Original chapter metadata and abstract; historically software-oriented. |
| EV-FEB-009 | Henderson-Sellers and Ralyté, “Situational Method Engineering: State-of-the-Art Review,” 2010 | Covers method metamodels, fragments/chunks, construction, tailoring, and method-quality evaluation. | Review article; focus is software-development methods. |
| EV-FEB-010 | OMG SPEM 2.0 | Provides an official metamodel for software and systems process engineering, including reusable method content and processes. | A specification does not establish outcome superiority. |
| EV-FEB-011 | ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148:2018 | Covers requirements-engineering processes, required information items, and their contents across the lifecycle. | Public abstract/metadata; current edition is marked for revision. |
| EV-FEB-012 | W3C PROV-O | Provides a domain-extensible, interoperable provenance model with formal constraints and multiple serializations. | General provenance semantics, not an FE process. |
| EV-FEB-013 | W3C OWL 2 Profiles | Demonstrates standardized tradeoffs among ontology expressiveness, computational properties, and reasoning use cases. | Covers ontology representation, not full framework lifecycle. |
| EV-FEB-014 | Hevner et al., “Design Science in Information Systems Research,” 2004 | Design science creates and evaluates artifacts and generates knowledge through building and application. | Information-systems framing; does not target analytical frameworks exclusively. |
| EV-FEB-015 | Venable, Pries-Heje, and Baskerville, FEDS, 2016 | Artifact evaluation should demonstrate utility, quality, and efficacy; may be formative or summative and artificial or naturalistic; should examine comparison, side effects, and explanatory mechanisms. | Methodological framework, not evidence about FE. |
| EV-FEB-016 | Howard, “Decision Analysis: Practice and Promise,” 1988 | Decision analysis structures, elicits, evaluates, and appraises decisions while separating normative and descriptive concerns and representing uncertainty and value. | Abstract-access evidence; field practice is broader than one article. |
| EV-FEB-017 | INFORMS Decision Analysis Society bylaws | Defines a professional community focused on logical methods for structuring and analyzing complex evaluation, inference, and decision problems to improve decision quality. | Institutional self-description. |
| EV-FEB-018 | NASA Systems Engineering Handbook | Includes decision analysis, trade studies, uncertainty, assumptions, sensitivity, and decision documentation within systems engineering. | Agency handbook; use is contextual rather than universal. |
| EV-FEB-019 | NIST/SEMATECH Engineering Statistics Handbook | Supplies engineering methods for measurement, experimental design, comparison, process improvement, monitoring, and reliability. | Statistical methods do not define the FE object or governance. |
| EV-FEB-020 | ISO 9001:2015 | Establishes a process-based quality-management system with customer focus, controlled processes, competent people, evaluation, and continual improvement. | Public summary/metadata, not the normative standard text. |
| EV-FEB-021 | ISO 30401:2018 | Specifies establishing, implementing, maintaining, reviewing, and improving a knowledge-management system. | Public abstract/metadata; replacement work is in progress. |
| EV-FEB-022 | Argyris, “Double Loop Learning in Organizations,” 1977 | Organizational learning can revise governing assumptions and policies rather than only correct action within existing rules. | Original practitioner article; not an engineering standard. |
| EV-FEB-023 | American Society for Cybernetics, Definitions | Curates the field's recurring concerns with control, communication, feedback, adaptation, regulation, and self-organization. | Curated secondary compilation; definitions are plural and historical. |
| EV-FEB-024 | FIPA Agent Management Specification | Standardizes agent identity, services, lifecycle, creation, registration, discovery, communication, migration, and retirement. | Older interoperability standard; not a complete modern agent-engineering discipline. |
| EV-FEB-025 | Zambonelli, Jennings, and Wooldridge, “Developing Multiagent Systems: The Gaia Methodology,” 2003 | Treats multi-agent systems as computational organizations and supplies organizational abstractions for analysis and design. | Software-agent focus; does not validate current LLM-agent workflows. |
| EV-FEB-026 | NIST AI Agent Standards Initiative, 2026 | Shows active standards work on agent interoperability, identity, security, and trustworthy adoption. | New initiative; institutional and technical outcomes remain emerging. |
| EV-FEB-027 | NASEM, Reproducibility and Replicability in Science highlights | Separates computational reproducibility from replication using new data and explains why failed replication can be scientifically informative. | Cross-science guidance rather than FE-specific validation. |
| EV-FEB-028 | IEEE Computer Society, SWEBOK v4 resources | Demonstrates a consensus-driven, evolving body of knowledge used for education, professional development, standardization, and certification. | Software engineering exemplar, not a mandatory maturity sequence. |
| EV-FEB-029 | Engineering Council, UK-SPEC | Professional recognition requires demonstrated knowledge, design/problem solving, responsibility, leadership, communication, and professional commitment assessed independently. | UK professional framework; jurisdiction-specific. |
| EV-FEB-030 | NSPE Code of Ethics | Mature engineering practice includes public-welfare duties, competence boundaries, truthfulness, and professional accountability. | US professional code; not an empirical boundary test. |
Repository evidence
| Evidence ID | Observation | Interpretation | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| EV-FEB-R01 | FE contains theory, hypotheses, experiments, comparison instruments, profile tooling, registries, and governance artifacts. | FE is an executable internal research program. | high |
| EV-FEB-R02 | FE-THEORY-0.1 and the 2026-07-23 evaluation explicitly retain low confidence in distinctiveness and efficacy. | The repository's current authority does not support discipline status. | high |
| EV-FEB-R03 | Existing experiments primarily test representation stability, traceability, and workflow mechanics; none is a matched test against adjacent methods with independent outcome evaluation. | Incremental causal value is untested. | high |
| EV-FEB-R04 | ROS–FE Profile v1.0 validates canonical records and generated registries, but not the content of execution-local draft records or complete execution packets. | The operating profile is useful pilot infrastructure with enforceability gaps. | high |
| EV-FEB-R05 | FE has no demonstrated independent practitioner community, accredited curriculum, professional competency model, ethics code, credentialing route, external body of knowledge, or field standard. | Institutional maturity is far below established engineering disciplines. | moderate-high |
| EV-FEB-R06 | EX-FE-0002 is a strong blinded mechanism-boundary protocol, but its controlling v1.1 record remains Stage A incomplete, Stage B blocked, and classification inconclusive; its machine-only v1.2 pilot is incomplete. EX-FE-0003 records no execution data. |
This review can propose a synthesis and source repair, but it cannot claim to have completed the prior experiment or produced matched outcome evidence. | high |
Negative search evidence
Targeted searches for the exact phrase “framework engineering” did not reveal an established engineering discipline matching the repository's definition. They did reveal unrelated uses of the phrase and work on evaluating engineering models and conceptual frameworks. This is a bounded search result, not proof of absence. The finding therefore weakens external-maturity claims but does not falsify the possibility of a useful new profile.
Source coverage and residual gaps
The registry covers every frozen comparator and all 12 comparison dimensions. Residual limitations remain:
- Several ISO records were available only as official abstracts and metadata.
- No systematic bibliometric study was performed.
- No interviews or surveys of practitioners were performed.
- “Knowledge engineering” and “cybernetics” are internally diverse; a single source cannot exhaust either field.
- Current LLM-agent engineering is rapidly changing and lacks settled institutional boundaries.
- Literature cannot answer the central causal question: whether using the FE profile produces better net outcomes than matched alternatives.