Biblio

The software development life cycle (SDLC) starts with business and functional specifications signed with a client. In addition to this, the specifications also capture policy / procedure / contractual / regulatory / legislation / standard compliances with respect to a given client industry. The SDLC must adhere to service level agreements (SLAs) while being compliant to development activities, processes, tools, frameworks, and reuse of open-source software components. In today's world, global software development happens across geographically distributed (autonomous) teams consuming extraordinary amounts of open source components drawn from a variety of disparate sources. Although this is helping organizations deal with technical and economic challenges, it is also increasing unintended risks, e.g., use of a non-complaint license software might lead to copyright issues and litigations, use of a library with vulnerabilities pose security risks etc. Mitigation of such risks and remedial measures is a challenge due to lack of visibility and transparency of activities across these distributed teams as they mostly operate in silos. We believe a unified model that non-invasively monitors and analyzes the activities of distributed teams will help a long way in building software that adhere to various compliances. In this paper, we propose a decentralized CAG - Compliance Adherence and Governance framework using blockchain technologies. Our framework (i) enables the capturing of required data points based on compliance specifications, (ii) analyzes the events for non-conformant behavior through smart contracts, (iii) provides real-time alerts, and (iv) records and maintains an immutable audit trail of various activities.

Interpersonal trust is one of the key components of efficient teamwork. Research suggests two main approaches for trust formation: personal information exchange (e.g., social icebreakers), and creating a context of risk and interdependence (e.g., trust falls). However, because these strategies are difficult to implement in an online setting, trust is more difficult to achieve and preserve in distributed teams. In this paper, we argue that games are an optimal environment for trust formation because they can simulate both risk and interdependence. Results of our online experiment show that a social game can be more effective than a social task at fostering interpersonal trust. Furthermore, trust formation through the game is reliable, but trust depends on several contingencies in the social task. Our work suggests that gameplay interactions do not merely promote impoverished versions of the rich ties formed through conversation; but rather engender genuine social bonds. \textbackslash