A Software Engineering Approach to Traditional Governance

Solving the scale problem

The Governance Engineer

When you ask a software engineer to design a governance team, governance engineering happens.

Does that sound familiar? It’s a riff on the definition of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) from the introduction written by Ben Treynor Sloss in the original Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) book, where “operations teams” has been replaced by “governance team.”

SRE is a big inspiration for Governance Engineering due to the strong similarity in the addressed problems. Before SRE (and DevOps), the work required to manage infrastructure and services was largely manual, repetitive, and done at a tactical level. It meant that the human effort required to handle this work scaled at least linearly with the size of your infrastructure.

The same problem lies at the heart of software governance. Audit, security, and compliance work scales at least linearly with the amount of change you make. As software teams deliver faster changes to more fine-grained and distributed systems, governance becomes a massive challenge for regulated software teams.