Effective development organizations use policies and controls in order to keep their development efforts going smoothly. Many processes are specified in an activity-centric manner, and software development frequently encompasses multiple activities at once. As a result, it is hard to enforce policies and controls. People inadvertently violate them, to the detriment of the software product. Teams need a different approach to enable automatic specification and enactment of policies and controls across development tools.
Our Approach
Governor reduces the risks associated with failures to follow established processes by providing a set of tools for specifying and enacting governance solutions in an artifact-centric manner.
Governor has three key capabilities:
- Enables specifying governance solutions. Governance solutions specify what needs to happen as key artifacts move through the various states in their lifecycle. Specifying decision points and policies on the transitions of artifact lifecycles rather than process activities offers maximum flexibility to the developers by offering the freedom to select among the approaches available to address a given issue, as long as the results are consistent with the artifact lifecycle semantics and policies.
- Identifies roles and key decision points. The governance team sets up roles, responsibilities, and decision rights for every decision associated with an artifact transition. Governor transforms these specifications into code that can be deployed for process enactment across all the tools that the development team uses. When key decision points are reached, Governor notifies the appropriate people that they need to take action.
- Promotes the governance lifecycle by automating its solutions. Governor audits the actions taken and decisions made during enactment. It collects a variety of measurements to evaluate and improve governance effectiveness.
Benefits
High-quality, flexible automation of development governance in a way that helps the whole team do their work and avoid common problems.
Lets the organization reduce the risk that comes with process compliance failures and more easily certify compliance for regulatory and other agencies.
Gives project managers the power to measure the effectiveness of decisions and process, and readily change and deploy policies and processes to improve outcomes.
Governor Team
Technical Lead: Avi Yaeli, Haifa Research Laboratory
Yael Dubinsky, Haifa Research Laboratory
Tim Klinger, Watson Research Center (Hawthorne)
Alex Kofman, Haifa Research Laboratory
Gilad Saadoun, Haifa Research Laboratory
Peri Tarr, Watson Research Center (Hawthorne)
Clay Williams, Watson Research Center (Hawthorne)
Wei Zhao, China Research Laboratory