10 principles to ensure strong cybersecurity in agile development

Specify safety necessities utilizing the developer’s format

Use the builders’ format (consumer tales, software program requirement specs, story mapping, wireframes, personas, and use circumstances) to articulate safety necessities in order that builders can higher perceive, outline, and implement safety specs.

This permits safety necessities to be handled as purposeful necessities within the product backlog, reworking them into duties (a.ok.a. decomposition), incorporating them into necessities administration instruments and together with them within the mission’s productiveness metrics (akin to burndown and velocity).

Conduct menace modeling

Conduct common menace modeling workouts to know the safety context of the appliance, to uncover elements of the design that aren’t safe, to establish, analyze, and prioritize threats; to find the most typical strategies and strategies used to assault the appliance (spoofing, tampering, denial of companies, escalation of privilege), to establish which threats warrant further safety testing and most significantly, to supply methods and options to mitigate every menace proactively.

Make use of safe programming strategies

Mandate builders to leverage established safe programming strategies akin to pair programming, refactoring, steady enchancment/steady growth (CI/CD), peer evaluation, safety iterations and test-driven growth.

This improves the non-functional qualities of the appliance code and helps take away programming defects that enable safety vulnerabilities to be exploited. Safe programming strategies are additionally helpful in directing builders who’re inexperienced at safe strategies, utilizing new applied sciences like AI or low-code/no-code, creating a facet of an utility that’s complicated, integrating third-party functions, or assembly compliance necessities.

Carry out unbiased safety evaluations

Get unbiased reviewers to carry out static code evaluation (evaluation supply code to research errors, bugs, and loopholes within the utility code) and dynamic evaluation (study utility habits throughout execution to establish uncommon or sudden habits). This supplies assurance to stakeholders that the appliance meets safety necessities and doesn’t embody any safety vulnerabilities.