Code Governance
What is Code Governance?
Code Governance
What is Code Governance?
Code governance refers to the set of policies, best practices, and past learnings that organizations use to manage and control their software development.
Why it is a big problem?
Let’s, understand the problem from two different perspectives
- Ensuring Adherence to Organization Standards: The biggest challenge for them is to ensure that the code written by developers or AI adheres to the company-specific best practices, maintains the security posture, and incorporates past learnings.
It can be as simple as how the organization handles logging or as complex as how a perticular language should use event loops in asynchronous calls.
- Impact of Non-Adherence: Non-adherence leads to an increase in tech debt, compliance issues, and wasted development time spent fixing recurring known issues.
- Ensuring Adherence to Organization Standards: The biggest challenge for them is to ensure that the code written by developers or AI adheres to the company-specific best practices, maintains the security posture, and incorporates past learnings.
It can be as simple as how the organization handles logging or as complex as how a perticular language should use event loops in asynchronous calls.
- Impact of Non-Adherence: Non-adherence leads to an increase in tech debt, compliance issues, and wasted development time spent fixing recurring known issues.
- Scattered Knowledge: Language-specific policies on coding standards and best practices are all over the place—in videos, documents, and forums. It’s hard for developers to find what they need when they need it.
- Too Much Information: Governance docs can be really long and boring. Developers aren’t going to read through all of it, which leads to inconsistent coding.
- Different Skill Levels: Teams have developers with different experience levels. Junior developers, who write the majority of code, often struggle with complex governance policies, and they are designed for them.
- Fast-Paced Development: Fast-moving sprints, focus on quick iterations, leaving little time to no time to stop and read detailed best practices docs.
- Change Resistance: Developers may push back against new policies if they think it’ll slow them down or add unnecessary bureaucracy.
How can we fix it?
Integrating Code Governance into IDEs and PR Reviews
Imagine if developers had access to this intelligence right within their IDEs. In real-time, they could see if they’re violating coding standards, security policies, or past learnings, and fix it right then and there. Even if issues slip past the IDE, they’d be flagged during the pull request review stage.