  Context: Agility at the business level requires Information Technology (IT)
environment flexible and customizable, as well as effective and responsive
governance in order to deliver value faster, better, and cheaper to the
business. Objective: To understand better this context, our paper seeks to
investigate how the domain of agile governance has evolved, as well as to
derive implications for research and practice. Method: We conducted a
systematic review about the state of art of the agile governance up to and
including 2013. Our search strategy identified 1992 studies in 10 databases, of
which 167 had the potential to answer our research questions. Results: We
organized the studies into four major groups: software engineering, enterprise,
manufacturing and multidisciplinary; classifying them into 16 emerging
categories. As a result, the review provides a convergent definition for agile
governance, six meta- principles, and a map of findings organized by topic and
classified by relevance and convergence. Conclusion: The found evidence lead us
to believe that agile governance is a relatively new, wide and
multidisciplinary area focused on organizational performance and
competitiveness that needs to be more intensively studied. Finally, we made
improvements and additions to the methodological approach for systematic
reviews and qualitative studies.
