Work

An Empirical Study of Policy as Code: Adoption, Purpose, and Maintenance

Year: 2026

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Policy as Code (PaC) is an emerging DevOps practice that enables teams to specify organisational and technical policies, such as regulatory compliance, security requirements, and resource limits, through machine-enforceable declarative code. As PaC gains prominence, practitioners face difficulties in adopting PaC while there remains a limited empirical understanding of how these policies are introduced, what types can be expressed, and how they are maintained in practice.

Source: International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

DOI: 10.1145/3793302.3793355

Authors: Ruben Opdebeeck, Mahmoud Alfadel, Akond Rahman, Yutaro Kashiwa, João F. Ferreira, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Coen De Roover

Institutions: Vrije Universiteit Brussel, University of Calgary, Auburn University, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Investigação e Desenvolvimento, Universidade do Porto, The University of Osaka

Language: English

Topic: Software Engineering Techniques and Practices

Subfield: Information Systems

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funders: National Science Foundation, Vlaamse Overheid, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

Awards: InfraGov: Framework Pública para Infraestrutura IT Confiável e Segura, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa, SHF: Small: Resilient Operations for Deployment Units Used in Container Orchestration

OpenAlex ID: W7171986568

FWCI: 11.19

Cites: 79

Cited by: 6

Related to: 10