CI/CD Implementation and Testing
We help to organize and coordinate CI/CD processes in the project, find and eliminate pitfalls and significantly accelerate delivery.
In the world of Agile development, new versions and small updates are released daily for many companies, where small teams work side-by-side to improve products daily. Agile offers benefits including higher confidence by customers, the ability to make changes and fix issues immediately and in small increments, better, faster testing, and improved planning. Tech companies like Netflix, Etsy, and Amazon have become household names to watch, thanks largely to how they innovated (and continue to innovate) using the Agile methodology.
Our current situation is that most organizations have or are planning on adopting Agile principles in the next several years – yet few of them have figured out how security is going to work within the new methodology. The changes that Agile brings – frequent product releases and dynamic feature changes, among others – create a wholly different threat landscape from those posed by waterfall development methodologies.
There are plenty of reasons why security is left behind in many Agile organizations, but for the sake of brevity, we’ll break it down into two main issues.
Security is seen as a ‘Non-Functional Requirement’ (NFR), a requirement related to the state of the system, rather than, as the name suggests, functional areas of the system.
The problem with NFRs in Agile organizations is that they are hard to pin down in user stories, a main feature of the Agile methodology.
User stories follow a structure of “As a (type of user), I want/need (some goal/desire) so that (reason for goal/desire)”. Each requirement is crafted into a story with a reasoning for the requirement so that developers can plan for the experiences real people will have with the project. These stories closely guide team planning and development. Security requirements can be hard to turn into tangible stories. Especially given the fact that security controls often arise through risk aversion processes that include looking at the full threat landscape, security can be hard to pin down to one story in one application. It’s not impossible, but a lack of strong security user stories can easily prevent security from being planned or implemented correctly.
The second reason why security and Agile have historically been at odds is a lack of Agile-ready security practices and tools.
In waterfall methodologies, security planning is done at the beginning, while security testing is accomplished at the end. Security is missing from the whole middle part – the development process. While this may have worked to some degree in waterfall development organizations, it simply can’t in Agile. When it comes to Agile, security requirements and processes need to be synced up to business requirements. Security can’t (and won’t) be done in a vacuum – Agile organizations, and the security teams within them, need to make sure security fits in with the rest of the crew.
The process of integrating a secure development lifecycle into the Agile development process can be described by the following high-level steps:
Successful implementation of the steps described above will allow your SDLC process to meet the main security objectives:
As a result, you will build and maintain a mature process of secure development and be able to confirm its compliance with industry standards, such as PCI Software Security Framework or ISO 27001.
We help to organize and coordinate CI/CD processes in the project, find and eliminate pitfalls and significantly accelerate delivery.
We as a test management team would work with technical teams to ensure the necessary data types are loaded in the environment.
Lower test environment set-up and support costs.
Flexible and faster test environment provisioning and support services delivery.
End-to-end environment management.