Traditional approaches to security have relied on up-front specification followed by validation at the end. This “Security Sandwich” approach is hard to integrate into Agile teams, since much of the design happens throughout the process, and it does not leverage the automation opportunities provided by continuous delivery. Organizations should look at how they can inject security practices throughout the agile development cycle. This includes: evaluating the right level of Threat Modeling to do up-front; when to classify security concerns as their own stories, acceptance criteria, or cross-cutting non-functional requirements; including automatic static and dynamic security testing into your build pipeline; and how to include deeper testing, such as penetration testing, into releases in a continuous delivery model. In much the same way that DevOps has recast how historically adversarial groups can work together, the same is happening for security and development professionals. (But despite our dislike of the Security Sandwich model, it is much better than not considering security at all, which is sadly still a common circumstance.)

Traditional approaches to security have relied on up-front specification followed by validation at the end. This “Security Sandwich” approach is hard to integrate into Agile teams, since much of the design happens throughout the process, and it does not leverage the automation opportunities provided by continuous delivery. Organizations should look at how they can inject security practices throughout the agile development cycle. This includes: evaluating the right level of Threat Modeling to do up-front; when to classify security concerns as their own stories, acceptance criteria, or cross-cutting non-functional requirements; including automatic static and dynamic security testing into your build pipeline; and how to include deeper testing, such as penetration testing, into releases in a continuous delivery model. In much the same way that DevOps has recast how historically adversarial groups can work together, the same is happening for security and development professionals.