Agile software development is the method of developing high-quality software solutions, websites, web applications, and mobile applications, wherein the requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers. Its focus is on early and continuous software delivery and enables requirement changes even in late development stages.
Benefits of agile project management
- High product quality
- Higher customer satisfaction
- Increased project control
- Reduced risks
- Faster ROI
Creating a Secure Development Lifecycle in an Agile Organization
So, in the face of a movement that’s not likely to lose steam in the future, it’s up to organizations to ensure they’re implementing security correctly – and in ways that make the most sense in an Agile environment. What steps can you take to make sure security works in Agile organizations? Here are the top five ways to ensure secure software development in the Agile era.
1. Add security acceptance criteria in user stories
Capture unique security criteria that are not covered by cross-functional requirements in stories and validate these in the QA process. During core development, programmers should be put in charge of security scans and fixes. This is a great way to help push security into earlier stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC), where security issues are best dealt with.
2. Put Developers in Charge of Secure Development
If security is going to work in Agile environments, one of the most important changes to make is making developers responsible for secure development.
Why is this so important? Because as we currently stand, there is an average of 100 developers for every member of the security team, severely cutting down the ability for the security team to take responsibility for all aspects of security. So to offset this imbalance and also ensure security is implemented and taken seriously, it’s crucial to give developers security responsibilities.
3. Use Agile Retrospectives
Agile retrospectives help teams to review their type of work and improve themselves continuously. In a retrospective, you can uncover major or recurring security problems. It will help you to discover the main causes of security issues, which can be resolved to avoid similar issues in the future.
4. Adapt, Iterate and Grow to Keep Security Agile
Embedded within the Agile methodology is the requirement to continually measure, adapt, and attempt to improve current tools and processes. This is part of the fluid nature of Agile’s need to continuously change to better fit the needs of the teams and the business as a whole. To keep security relevant within the confines of an Agile organization, it’s important to do the same for security.
The security industry is changing rapidly just as development is – and it’ll be up to the security team to ensure all changes are appropriately covered. As new tools and processes are introduced or changed, so too will security need to be adjusted.
5. Build security into your pipeline
The best place to start automating security best practices is your pipeline. With the help of static and dynamic analysis tools, we can identify vulnerabilities that were missed out during the development and testing stages. Automated pipeline check will ensure the automatic checks for libraries. Automated checks for libraries that need to be updated can be made simple by including an automated pipeline check.
