The Software Development Governance initiative at IBM Research seeks to help businesses and IT organizations understand and increase the delivered value of software, while managing the risks.
Businesses today face a variety of pressures, including global competition, increasing customer demands, and legislative and regulatory requirements for increased accountability and compliance. Most businesses rely on software technologies to help them cope with these pressures and to differentiate them from their competitors. The result is that software is pervasive and strategically important for business success in almost all industries.
As software has become more central to businesses, two important needs have emerged. First, businesses need techniques for understanding the value provided by software development and delivery. This is crucial to help businesses optimize their investment in software-related activities. Second, businesses need insight into the risks incurred through software development and delivery activities, at both a technical and business level. Cost overruns, schedule slippage, quality issues, and failure to understand and deliver the functionality the business needs most are big risks in software development.
Why Governance is Important for Software Development Projects
The Software Development Governance initiative at IBM Research seeks to help businesses and IT organizations understand and increase the delivered value of software, while managing the risks. The Software Development Governance team is developing techniques and tools that:
- Align software development projects with business priorities so that delivered software provides the desired value.
- Provide insight into and help managing the technical and business risks associated with software projects.
- Deliver support for managing roles, responsibilities, policies, measurement, and performance in teams.
Software Development Governance Projects
- Ensemble reduces risks incurred by communication failures by promoting communication between developers doing related work.
- Financier gives project and program managers insight into the financial value of one or more projects to identify and manage risks.
- Governor helps IT organizations manage project roles and associated decision rights including managing the policies that constrain decisions and promote compliance with processes.
- Tempo lets project managers understand and manage the variability of schedule overruns--a key source of risk in software development projects.
Contact Information
For more information about this project, please contact the principal investigator, Clay Williams.
Colophon: The Software Development Governance project seeks to create tools which help illuminate the multidimensional nature of software development. The image above is a three-dimensional projection of a six-dimensional Calibi-Yau manifold (taken from Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons license). The manifold represents a possible compactification solution to the problem posed by string theory: that we live in an eleven-dimensional universe but
perceive only four.
Last updated 9 Mar 2009
