Organizations: University of Calabria, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (DeMaCS)
Abstract
Engineering projects are the result of the combined effort of their members. Yet, it has been documented that labor division withing projects is unevenly distributed: some project members are specialists undertaking only few tasks, whereas other are generalists and are responsible for the success of many tasks. Moreover, the latter are often facilitators of project integration. Such a workload distribution prompts one question: how resilient is a project to key personnel loss? Far from being a theoretical problem, the reliance of a project on a few key people can lead to severe economic losses and delays. We argue that current methods to estimate such a risk are unsatisfactory: some methods offer a best-case estimate and are, therefore, too optimistic; other methods fail to capture project fragmentation leading to biased estimates and unrealistic consequences in many settings. In this paper, we develop a novel method to assess project vulnerability by looking at it from the lens of network robustness. We compare our method against existing alternatives and show that it offers better and more consistent estimates of project resilience to personnel loss.
AI is changing work and decision making faster than many institutions can adapt their operating practices. We argue that this adaptation gap makes human resilience a core capability for the AI era. We define resilience as the capacity to absorb disruption while preserving effective action and human agency around core purposes. The framework operates at three interacting levels. Psychological resilience keeps a person goal-directed under stress. Social resilience makes trusted support and correction available across a group. Organizational resilience turns detected problems into learning and recovery. We connect established resilience and technostress research with direct AI-in-the-loop experiments. General resilience is trainable, while AI-specific causal evidence is still emerging. Direct AI studies show that assistance can raise productivity and spread expertise. Other experiments show improved expressed empathy and more calibrated reliance. We translate these findings into a practical agenda for AI education, workplace design, governance, and evaluation. The central proposal is socio-technical: structural safeguards define the operating boundary, while resilient people and institutions provide adaptive capacity when conditions change.
Software engineering (SE) organizations operate in a knowledge-intensive domain where critical assets -- architectural expertise, design rationale, and system intuition -- are overwhelmingly tacit and volatile. The departure of key contributors or the decay of undocumented decisions can severely impair project velocity and software quality. While conventional SE risk management optimized for schedule and budget is common, the intangible knowledge risks that determine project success remain under-represented. The goal of this research work is to propose and evaluate the Knowledge Lever Risk Management (KLRM) Framework, designed specifically for the software development lifecycle. The primary objectives are to: (1) recast intangible knowledge assets as active mechanisms for risk mitigation (Knowledge Levers); (2) integrate these levers into a structured four-phase architecture (Audit, Alignment, Activation, Assurance); and (3) provide a formal stochastic model to quantify the impact of lever activation on project knowledge capital. We detail the application of these levers through software-specific practices such as pair programming, architectural decision records (ADRs), and LLM-assisted development. Stochastic Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that full lever activation increases expected knowledge capital by 63.8% and virtually eliminates knowledge crisis probability. Our research shows that knowledge lever activation improves alignment across the project management iron triangle (scope, time, cost) by reducing rework and rediscovery costs.
Robustness is widely viewed as a key challenge for real-world applications. However, because current research focuses only on difficult tasks, it partially captures real-world readiness. In this paper, we argue and verify that robustness, defined as consistency across semantically equivalent inputs, closely follows task difficulty: once models master a task, robustness emerges naturally. Through an empirical analysis of multiple models across diverse datasets and configurations (e.g., paraphrases, temperature changes), we observe a strong positive correlation between task performance and robustness. Furthermore, our findings indicate that robustness is driven primarily by task-specific competence rather than inherent model attributes, challenging the common view of robustness as an independent capability. This perspective implies that as tasks mature and model performance saturates, robustness on those tasks will similarly emerge. For researchers, this suggests that explicit efforts to measure robustness may deserve reduced emphasis, as robustness is likely to improve alongside performance. For practitioners, it signals that while many existing benchmarks are still unstable, models are already reliable on earlier tasks and suitable for deployment.