Governance Gates

In a traditional SDLC, control points are implicit. A human is in the loop at almost every step, so review, approval, and sign-off happen as a matter of course. When an autonomous agent compresses plan-to-merge from days into minutes, those implicit checkpoints disappear, and with them the team's visibility into what was changed, why, and on whose authority.

Governance gates put those checkpoints back, deliberately and explicitly. A gate sits at the boundary between two stages of an agent's pipeline: between planning and implementation, implementation and merge, or merge and deploy. Instead of trusting the agent to self-police, the gate makes advancement conditional. The work stops until a defined criterion is met. That lets teams grant agents real autonomy inside each stage while keeping firm control over the transitions that carry risk, with a record of who or what approved each one.

A team assigns an agent a database migration. The agent analyzes the schema, drafts a migration plan, and reaches the first gate, an automated check that the plan compiles against a shadow database and violates no data-retention policies. It passes. The next gate is human: because schema changes are high-risk, a senior engineer must approve the architecture before the agent writes a single migration file. Only after that sign-off does the agent generate the code, open a PR, and stop again at a final CI gate before merge.