Series: The software development practices for 2021
The Software Development Practices that one should focus in 2021…
The software world has been evolving continuously more than any other comparative field/sector in the world. The consumers have become even more demanding and need everything on their fingertip, which requires the organizations to adopt new tech. and deliver new features in no-time. Having a commercial website down for hours is no more acceptable. You not only lose your customers but the credibility due to social network connectivity and the word of mouth spreads faster due to — Post or Tweet on Social Media.
1- DevSecOps: Development, Security & Operations, that means, security embedded at every step of the development of a software product, starting with initial design and choice of tools and processes integrated in an automated fashion to achieve — automated testing, deployment, continuous integration, and delivery. The DevOps practices have been in the market for a while but DevSecOps practices are still emerging as we learn and explore, there are various tools to verify the workloads or vulnerabilities in your App/API etc. With the help of Infrastructure as code, one can easily create resources like — virtual machines, containers, network configurations, gateways, databases, while the DevSecOps tools can help scanning all these resources and then embedded that code into DevOps pipelines for deployment in the desired way. Gartner has highlighted DevSecOps as one of the fastest-growing areas of interest and predicts it will be a major focus of a variety of software development teams in 2021.
Some Benefits? Sure…
a. Speed & Security of software products: gone are the days when we had silos in software development practices where development teams, release management teams, operations, and security teams used to publish their standards, framework, best practices and expected others to follow & ensure the adoption of those practices without looking at the end to end process. If you need speed (to deliver your products faster) where you can deploy every sprint (2 weeks or a month or of your choice) then you need to embed security from the design phase and ensure those best practices are followed in an integrated manner.
b. Faster detection of security issues and patching: the idea is to develop an organizational mindset & provide an ability to detect the probable security threats/issues at a very early stage of the development cycle to further avoid bug fixes at a later stage — eventually save cost & time spent on fixing those issues. Even, if you come across a bug at a later stage; due to automated CI-CD practices your team should be able to deploy on-demand and in no time — by reducing the additional cybersecurity or testing of the software.
c. Automation & high-quality products: test-driven-development is not new and for the last many years cybersecurity enabled tools & frameworks are playing a key role to improve the overall application security. Especially in the cloud world where continuous integration/delivery pipelines can use tools like Sonarqube or Coverity or Fortify etc. to ship their quality products.
There are many other benefits on DevSecOps practices, but I am not going to detail those out in this short blog, however here are some links for you to read and find more about tools:
Gartner, Tools
The Second practice that I would like to mention in this series is Microservices… Stay tuned!!
