Use Case: SDLC Governance

Overview

Modern software organisations struggle to govern delivery without slowing teams down. Governance is often fragmented across tools, applied too late, or dependent on manual reviews and retrospectives. As a result, risks surface after delivery outcomes are already impacted.

Cubyts enables continuous SDLC governance by combining two complementary capabilities:

• Flags – to detect and explain deviations at source

• Health – to measure, contextualise, and predict delivery outcomes

Together, they provide end-to-end governance across execution, outcomes, and future sustainability—without adding process overhead.

The Governance Challenge

Organisations typically face one or more of the following challenges:

• Limited visibility into in-flight delivery risk

• Retrospectives that identify issues but fail to prevent recurrence

• Technical debt and security risks accumulating silently

• Governance data scattered across delivery, code, and audit tools

• Manual audits and subjective reporting

Traditional governance answers what happened.
 Modern SDLC governance must also answer:

• What is going wrong now?

• Why is it going wrong?

• What will go wrong next if nothing changes?

The Cubyts SDLC Governance Model

Cubyts delivers SDLC governance through a closed-loop model built on two tightly connected layers:

• Flags, which continuously detect deviations and explain root causes

• Health, which measures current state, trends, and future risk

These layers operate together across the entire software delivery lifecycle.

Governance Layer 1: Flags

Detecting and Explaining Deviations

Flags are policy-driven governance signals that continuously evaluate delivery artifacts, workflows, and code changes.

They answer the question:
 “Why is delivery health degrading?”

Types of Flags

Process Flags – Governing Execution Discipline

• Detect deviations in planning, estimation, readiness, and workflow adherence

• Surface sprint overload, spillover risk, and execution drift

• Explain instability observed in sprint and portfolio health

Feature Flags – Governing Foundation Quality

• Validate the quality of requirements, designs, and build plans

• Detect feature drift before development begins

• Prevent rework caused by weak delivery foundations
  
  

Code Flags – Governing Technical Integrity

• Analyse branches and pull requests for quality, security, and vulnerability risks

• Detect OWASP-aligned security issues and unsafe coding patterns

• Support customer-defined custom code flags aligned to internal standards

• Integrate directly with Git and VS Code for in-workflow remediation

Together, flags ensure governance is continuous, explainable, and actionable.

Governance Layer 2: Health

Measuring, Learning, and Predicting Outcomes

Health converts large volumes of low-level signals into decision-ready indicators across multiple time horizons.

It answers the question:
 “How healthy is delivery—now, over time, and in the future?”

Types of Health

Ongoing Health – Sprint Health

• Provides real-time governance of active sprints

• Identifies delivery risk while work is still in motion

• Enables mid-sprint course correction
  
  

Retrospective Health – Portfolio Health

• Aggregates outcomes across sprints and teams

• Identifies systemic and recurring issues

• Grounds retrospectives and planning in objective evidence
  
  

Continuous Health – Predictive Repository Health

• Predicts future codebase degradation

• Anticipates technical debt and security exposure

• Enables preventive intervention beyond sprint or release cycles

Health ensures governance is time-aware and outcome-focused.

Closed-Loop Governance in Action

Cubyts connects Flags and Health into a single governance loop:

• A deviation is detected through a flag

• Its impact appears in sprint, portfolio, or predictive health

• Root cause is identified through linked deep-dive reports

• Targeted remediation is applied

• Health indicators improve as a result

This eliminates manual investigation, fragmented reporting, and opinion-based governance. Governance becomes continuous, traceable, and corrective.

End-to-End SDLC Traceability

SDLC Governance with Cubyts enables traceability across the full journey of software delivery:

• Delivery execution and planning

• Code changes and pull requests

• People ownership and accountability

• Audit and compliance deviations

Health reports indicate where risk exists.
 Flags and deep-dive reports explain why it exists.

This enables faster root-cause analysis, evidence-based decisions, and reduced audit overhead.

Role-Based Value

Developers

• Receive immediate, contextual feedback in Git and IDE workflows

• Resolve issues early, before they escalate

Engineering Managers

• Maintain execution discipline

• Control technical debt and long-term sustainability

Delivery Managers and PMO

• Improve predictability and portfolio stability

• Reduce sprint spillovers and delivery surprises

Architects

• Identify structural and sustainability risks early

• Guide long-term technical direction

Security Teams

• Shift vulnerability detection left into development

• Reduce post-release exposure

Leadership

• Gain objective, outcome-oriented visibility across the SDLC

• Make decisions based on evidence, not status reports

Audit and Compliance

• Access continuous, traceable governance evidence

• Reduce manual audits and documentation effort
  
  

Key Outcomes

With SDLC Governance enabled by Cubyts, organisations achieve:

• Fewer sprint failures and unplanned spillovers

• Reduced rework and scope erosion

• Lower accumulation of technical debt

• Earlier detection of security and compliance risks

• Faster, evidence-based decision making

• Governance without slowing delivery velocity

Why This Approach Works

This SDLC Governance model succeeds because it:

• Operates continuously, not periodically

• Governs execution, outcomes, and sustainability together

• Integrates into existing delivery and development workflows

• Adapts to organisational standards through configuration

• Focuses on prevention and enablement, not policing

Conclusion

SDLC Governance with Cubyts transforms governance from a reactive oversight function into a continuous, intelligence-driven system. By unifying Flags and Health, organisations gain real-time control, historical learning, and future-ready prevention—without compromising delivery speed.

Governance becomes an enabler of outcomes, not an obstacle to innovation.

Video: https://www.loom.com/share/c9b7e46b5e914ee6ab743f1dac73dcbc