The Rise of DevSecOps: Part 3

This is the third post in our DevSecOps series. Start with post 1

Last month, we wrote about how DevSecOps can help organizations comply with regulatory standards, including GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS. Even if your company isn’t in a regulated industry, complying with software development standards will help you deliver better products and get to market with fewer bugs.

What are Software Development Standards?

Software development standards lay out the guidelines and constraints for the software development process. By following industry standards, development teams create code that is easier to read, easier to maintain, more secure, and easier to scale. Let’s take a look at some of the types of standards that developers should be following:

• Code formatting and style guidelines
• Documentation standards
• Secure coding practices
• Software testing

There are named standards from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that you may want or need to comply with, including ISO 12207 (Systems and software engineering — Software life cycle processes) and ISO 15939 (Systems and software engineering — Measurement process).

How does automation help?

DevSecOps teams move quickly but continue to prioritize quality and secure code. When development cycles are shortened, it becomes more difficult for humans to manually check and enforce standards. Organizations that adopt automation strategies and tools can enforce coding, documentation, security, and testing standards as code is written.

Code Formatting and Style Guidelines

Code formatting and style guidelines provide consistency in the codebase, regardless of which developer on the team wrote that function or module. This consistency improves readability and developers can quickly understand what is happening without the need to parse through different naming conventions, different spacing (or no spacing!), and other style choices. Developers spend more time working on the next feature or bug fix and less effort tracing through unfamiliar code.

Before deciding on a new formatting and style guideline, check with the development team to validate whether the new rule will help readability and maintenance or generate more work and delays in code reviews without a corresponding benefit.

Because a team’s coding and style guidelines are set collaboratively and can differ based on the programming language and organization, it may not be second nature for new developers who followed different standards at their previous employer. Automation tools in the IDE and code quality analyzers that integrate with your git repository will reduce the cognitive load on developers, so they can focus on what they’re writing.

Documentation standards

Historically, you might have received a groan if you mentioned the word documentation to a room full of developers. Writing documentation is less fun than coding, but it is essential when working with other developers, using APIs, or even revisiting your own code months and years from now.

Fortunately, there are many tools out there that can generate automated documentation, such as Swagger and Doxygen. Newer AI tools, including GitHub Copilot, can generate comments and inline documentation in natural language.

Secure coding practices

DevOps and DevSecOps have pushed more responsibility onto developers, particularly when creating more secure code by design. However, developers may not have the same experience as security teams and are writing code to meet sprint cycles.

SAST, SCA, and DAST tools automate security scanning and tests, enabling developers and security teams to validate code earlier.

Software Testing

Automating software tests can help teams improve test coverage and consistency. Learn why QA Teams should care about DevOps.

Questions?

Schedule a call to see how ReleaseTEAM can help your business automate industry standards through improved DevOps processes, automated checks, and tools.