Roles, rights, and responsibilities: Better governance through decision rights automation

At its essence software development governance is about guiding the development organization so that it produces value that aligns with the needs of the business. As software development platforms mature they provide increasingly sophisticated capabilities for process measurement and guidance. These new capabilities in turn offer an excellent opportunity for governance tools to help guide the development. In this paper we discuss a model of the development organization that includes: roles, responsibilities, decisions, rights, artifacts and their lifecycles. We show how this model can be elicited and deployed as part of a governance solution to guide the development organization and provide a description of a prototype we have built to automate this process. We conclude with a discussion and important directions for future work in the area.