A Framework for Defining and Enforcing Governance Policies in Human-Agent Software Development

Software development increasingly involves heterogeneous stakeholders, including diverse human contributors and AI-powered agents. This amplifies governance challenges around transparency, participation, and accountability, particularly in Open-Source Software (OSS) projects where policies are usually implicit. Building on our prior vision paper, we present a framework for defining and enforcing governance policies via a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) and an executable decision engine. The DSL captures scopes, roles and individuals (with weighted participation and profiles), policy composition and deadlines, and platform-aware conditions. The engine operationalizes policies over collaboration events and records votes, rationales, and timestamps for traceability. We extend the core language with bindings for GitHub and GitLab and provide a form-based editor to ease authoring. We evaluate expressivity by formalizing existing GOVERNANCE.md files from a curated dataset and demonstrate enactment by reproducing three governance policies from different GitHub repositories.

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Publication Details

Journal
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Published
2026-09-15
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3844953
Primary Topic
Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

A Framework for Defining and Enforcing Governance Policies in Human-Agent Software Development

Gwendal Jouneaux, Javier Luis Izquierdo, Jordi Cabot, Adem Ait
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
article

A Framework for Defining and Enforcing Governance Policies in Human-Agent Software Development

Gwendal Jouneaux, Javier Luis Izquierdo, Jordi Cabot, Adem Ait
article en

Abstract

Software development increasingly involves heterogeneous stakeholders, including diverse human contributors and AI-powered agents. This amplifies governance challenges around transparency, participation, and accountability, particularly in Open-Source Software (OSS) projects where policies are usually implicit. Building on our prior vision paper, we present a framework for defining and enforcing governance policies via a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) and an executable decision engine. The DSL captures scopes, roles and individuals (with weighted participation and profiles), policy composition and deadlines, and platform-aware conditions. The engine operationalizes policies over collaboration events and records votes, rationales, and timestamps for traceability. We extend the core language with bindings for GitHub and GitLab and provide a form-based editor to ease authoring. We evaluate expressivity by formalizing existing GOVERNANCE.md files from a curated dataset and demonstrate enactment by reproducing three governance policies from different GitHub repositories.

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (ES), University of Luxembourg (LU), Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LU)
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
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A Framework for Defining and Enforcing Governance Policies in Human-Agent Software Development — Gwendal Jouneaux, Javier Luis Izquierdo, et al. · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS