Toward governance of emergent processes and adaptive organizations

Abstract

We propose to treat software development processes and software development organizations as adaptive and emergent entities: ones whose properties are not decidable a priori, but rather, which result from ongoing and continuous response to external stimuli, such as evolving requirements, new enterprise priorities, and changes in available resources. In this paper, we present a view of some important issues that must be addressed to govern such organizations. We provide what we think are interesting starting points for a discussion, as well as a few important questions to address during the workshop. Copyright 2008 ACM.