The Importance of Governance in Software Development

Mahesh Chopker

Jul. 03, 14 · Interview

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In this article I would like to highlight the importance of governance in software development life cycle.
What does 'Governance' means; in Oxford dictionary the meaning it has is:

the action or manner of governing a state, organization, etc.
rule, control

In software development life cycle we can think of governance as monitor, measure and management of software. Now what aspect to governance in software depends on the stage at which software development is currently?

In the following table I am trying to show the various software development stages, what entities need governance and tools/techniques used for governance:

Development Stage	What needs governance	How do we (or tools/techniques used for) govern?
Business Problem	The source of problem statement (real business case vs. developer’s wish) Project roadmap, timeline and resource constraints	Process exists to ensure right stakeholders are engaged, agreed upon project roadmap is defined, and resource pool, delivery timeline and risks are identified
Requirement Gathering	Use Case and Requirements Effort level and Risks	Requirement document reviewed and signed off from all major stakeholders (business, development and testing teams)
Architecture	Alignment with corporate IT Non FRs like Performance, Security	Architecture Review
Design	Design guidelines	Design review
Implementation	Code Quality Feature implementation	Code Review Code Coverage Feature Demo
Testing	Test Plan and Strategy Test Results and Coverage Score card on Non-FRs	Review of Test Plan, Strategy, Coverage, and Results Review of Non-FRs score card or compliance report
Documentation	Documents	Documentation Review
Deployment	Deployment Instructions	Deployment document review Deployment team’s feedback on ease of deployment and 1^st few weeks report from production
Service / Maintenance	Ease of troubleshooting Number of Customer found defects New feature request	Tracking production defects and ensuring root cause analysis done on the same Assess and feed feature requests to next release’s project requirements Process to have regular feedback from service team’s

In summary what is required for effective governance is a right process along with checklist, handoff templates, check points, retrospection meeting, open feedback culture and guidelines/standards.

The software life cycle and architecture management frameworks like ITIL, TOGAF do help to implement an effective governance process in in software development life cycle.

Software development

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