Forget DevSecOps and ShiftLeft

In this article, we're about to spill the beans on why this approach rocks, answer some burning questions, all while keeping our magic wand at the ready.

The Traditional DevSecOps Approach

DevSecOps, which emphasizes integrating security into the development process, has been a buzzword in the industry for some time. While the intentions behind it are commendable, the practicality of implementing it can be a challenge. The traditional DevSecOps approach involves running security scans and tests throughout the development process. Unfortunately, this can lead to several issues:

1. Development Tool Parity: Developers often face discrepancies between their local development environments and the security tools applied during the build pipeline. This can result in a false sense of security when code is committed, only to discover vulnerabilities later in the process.
2. Alert Fatigue: Continuous security scanning can generate a flood of alerts. When everything is an alert, it's challenging to distinguish critical issues from noise, leading to alert fatigue and potentially missing real threats.
3. Delayed Feedback: Email or alert-based notifications for security findings can disrupt the development workflow. Developers may skip or overlook them, causing vulnerabilities to persist until deployment.
4. Production Incident vs. Defect: Discovering security flaws in production is far from ideal. It transforms what was once a defect into a security incident, often with significant consequences.

Gates of Glory

We're talking about quality gates. Where code goes to die, or where security swoops in at the eleventh hour, capes and all, to save the day or tell you where you failed to meet some unwritten expectations.

Better Quality Gate

What Quality Gates were always meant to be. To provide quality and security assurances, when everyone considers the release is ready, that all agreed requirements were known up front and have been met.

Imagine a scenario where security is not a constant nag but rather a silent guardian that only springs into action when it's truly needed. This is where real quality gates come into play. Rather than scanning every line of code as it's pushed, it is assumed (and trust is given) that the developer did that already, quality gates are deployed only when the entire release is considered ready. Why? Because: