DevSecOps for Security and Safety-Critical Software Development

One of the most effective software development practices for safety-critical software is DevSecOps. Put simply, DevSecOps automates development and security processes to ensure the security and reliability of software. Here, we explain what you need to know about DevSecOps.

What You Need to Know About DevSecOps Automation

DevSecOps is a software development practice that automates and shortens feedback times to ensure secure software development. In general, safety-critical software development requires compliance with industry-specific, functional safety standards — each of which has its own set of core requirements to help you develop software that is safe and secure. While each standard’s guidance is unique, they all require a controlled, reliable, repeatable and automated set of delivery processes to demonstrate compliance. DevSecOps provides just that.

How DevSecOps Automation Works With CI/CD Pipelines

An important part of DevSecOps automation are CI/CD pipelines. In general, CI improves the quality of your codebase by breaking up tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks as well as by performing frequent code integrations. By using CI, you are able to identify problems sooner, easily encourage more modular changes to your code, automate tasks and detect issues quickly.

The Benefits of DevSecOps Automation

While you and your team may experience different benefits of DevSecOps, in general, the most common benefits of DevSecOps include the following:

Lowered development and operation costs. · Shortened development cycles.
Increased release pace.
Improved detection of software vulnerabilities and errors.
Reduced amount of failures and rollbacks associated with deployment.
Reduced amount of time to recover from a software development failure.

What DevSecOps Automation Tools Should You Use?

By using a DevSecOps tool to automate your processes, you ensure your software development process is free from software vulnerabilities and errors. The most common DevSecOps tool is a static application security testing (SAST) tool. A SAST tool automates your vulnerability detection processes, eliminates identified vulnerabilities, increases the pace of development and reduces the amount of disruption to your software development process.