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.
Authors
- Gwendal Jouneaux (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1158-9335)
- Javier Luis Izquierdo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2326-1700)
- Jordi Cabot (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2418-2489)
- Adem Ait (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5334-9041)
Institutions
- Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (ES)
- University of Luxembourg (LU)
- Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LU)
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