A Governing Function for Software

This working paper extends Olivier de Weck's Advanced Technology Roadmap Architecture (ATRA; Technology Roadmapping and Development, Springer, 2022) into the domain of software and artificial intelligence. ATRA rests on a governing equation relating a technology's characterizing variables to its figures of merit, and the standard objection to applying it to software, still more to large language models, is that no such equation exists. Rather than proposing a new law for software, this note conjectures that software's compositional structure is a governed object: established results, the denotational semantics of programs, the empirical scaling laws of learned systems, the measure theory of distributions, and de Weck's own sensitivity and active-constraint analysis, govern that one object at different positions of a single, explicitly conjectural determinacy axis, a classification of technologies by the character of their governing relationship (physical, deterministic-compositional, stochastic-compositional), orthogonal to the van Wyk / de Weck functional grid. The note renders the conjectured structure in de Weck's OPM/OPL notation, locates where the governing structure breaks down (the confidently-wrong-but-plausible residual), and derives as an engineering consequence an orchestration contract, bounded-resource envelope, correctness gate, graceful fallback to deterministic behaviour, whose invariants follow from the governed structure rather than being independently posited. Every substantive claim is labelled by epistemic standing (ESTABLISHED / CONJECTURE / OPEN) and by its relationship to de Weck's framework (EXTENDS / BEYOND). The whole is offered as a conjecture with named open formalization problems, not a theorem, and as a forward extension of de Weck's work, not a correction of it