FEATURE : SOFTWARE
Managing competing demands of development velocity and application security
Software tools are constantly offering new ways of working which enable organisations to compete . Patrick Carey , Director of Product Marketing at Synopsys , says that as the shape of software development continues to evolve , so too must the mechanisms to secure it .
The first software development team I worked on operated on the following mantra ; make it work , make it fast , make it elegant ( maybe ). Meaning , don ’ t worry about performance optimisations until your code actually does what it ’ s supposed to do , and don ’ t worry about code maintainability until after you know it both works and performs well . Users generally have no idea how maintainable the code is , but they do know if the application is broken or slow . So more often than not , we ’ d never get around to refactoring the code – at least not until the code debt started to impact application reliability and performance .
Today , that developer mantra has two additional lines :
• Ship it sooner
• And while you ’ re at it , make it secure
As with application performance and reliability , delivering an application on time is easily quantified and observed . Everybody knows when you miss a deadline – something that ’ s easy to do when your release cycles www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO
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