Software Engineering in a Governed World: Opportunities and Challenges

Modern software applications are becoming ubiquitous and pervasive affecting various aspects of our lives and livelihoods. At the same time, the risks to which these systems expose the organizations and end users are also growing dramatically. Governments and regulatory bodies are moving towards developing laws, regulations, and guidelines for several software applications (e.g., those that use data, are based on AI/ML etc.) across different domains. These mandates impose several challenges in the way how software is built and delivered, primary amongst them is to ensure that software and its delivery processes are compliant. There is a need for governance frameworks that enable the recording, monitoring, and analysis of various activities throughout the application development life cycle making the development processes transparent, traceable, verifiable, auditable, and adhering to regulations and best practices, thereby enabling trustworthiness of software. In this paper, we discuss about the challenges and opportunities of software engineering in the governance era.