A Framework for Defining and Enforcing Governance Policies in Human-Agent Software Development
TL;DR
This work presents a framework for defining and enforcing governance policies via a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) and an executable decision engine and extends the core language with bindings for GitHub and GitLab and provides a form-based editor to ease authoring.
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.