Economic Governance of Software Delivery

Agility without objective governance cannot scale, and governance without agility cannot compete. Agile methods are mainstream, and software enterprises are adopting these practices in diverse delivery contexts and at enterprise scale. IBM's broad industry experience with agile transformations and deep internal know-how point to two key principles to deliver sustained improvements in software business outcomes with higher confidence: measure and streamline change costs, and steer with economic governance and Bayesian analytics. Applying these two principles in context is the crux of measured improvement in continuous delivery of smarter software-intensive systems. This article describes more meaningful measurement and prediction foundations for economic governance. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/ghAM8ifyeVI is a video in which Walker Royce, author, IEEE Software editorial board member, and IBM Chief Software Economist, describes how to reason about software delivery governance with lean principles.