The landscape of software development doesn’t stand still for very long, with new tools and technologies constantly redefining the way we work—and increasing the pressure to release faster. The advent of AI has shifted everything in hyperspeed, with artificial intelligence promising to help us code, test, and deploy faster and more efficiently than ever before.
However, with every step of AI-driven progress there’s a new AI-driven vulnerability. And with the Software Development Times reporting that AI-generated code is now posing a major security risk in nearly half of all developmental tasks, now is the perfect time to get ahead of the threat.
Why hasn’t security traditionally been a part of testing?
The separation of security from quality assurance (QA) is a holdover from more traditional, waterfall-style development cycles—when development, testing, and security tasks were performed in siloed, sequential steps. While many teams are embracing agile development and DevSecOps, these older mindsets can be hard to break out of. Do any of these still ring true for your team?
Testing was focused on functionality
QA was measured on whether software met requirements, not whether it could be exploited. Security was generally owned by infrastructure and compliance teams, completely separate from dev and QA.
Teams had a reactive, not proactive, mindset
Security was validated at the end of the development cycle rather than built into testing processes. This often led to security being viewed as a “speedbump” on the way to releases, an annoyance to check off the to-do list rather than a critical practice.
Accountability was siloed
Developers shipped features, testers validated quality, and security was “someone else’s problem.” This led to a lack of accountability from dev and QA on ensuring that code was secure as it worked its way through the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Speed was prioritized over resilience
Industry pressures to deliver faster releases often meant skipping deep security validation in favor of hitting deadlines. When the pressure is on to release faster than ever, something has to give—and all of the factors above often played into security making the cut.
The current state of security testing
While teams are starting to catch on and integrate security earlier into their processes, it’s evident that teams are still working on shedding that siloed mindset.
In our Fourth Edition Software Testing and Quality Report, composed of insights from nearly 3,000 QA professionals, we asked respondents what roles are involved in their security testing:
While it’s promising that many testers know who’s involved in their security practices, “no dedicated security specialist” still ranked the highest. This indicates that in many teams, security is still a late-development afterthought, “someone else’s problem,” or not much of a priority at all. And among those teams who do have dedicated security specialists, these titles indicate that security is still siloed as its own function rather than embedded within the quality team.
For those who are performing security tests, a wide variety of tools are in use:
Wide adoption of penetration testing tools, vulnerability scanners, and cloud security tooling is promising—as well as the nearly a quarter of respondents who report already using Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools. While all of the tools on this chart can contribute to a holistic security strategy, SAST is the best to leverage alongside functional testing for actionable, repeatable results.
Shifting SAST left
In the practice of DevSecOps, SAST is implemented early in the development process—enabling teams to uncover and prioritize security vulnerabilities alongside functional defects and ensure those vulnerabilities are resolved long before the code enters production.
Additionally, shifting left also enables teams to easily integrate SAST scans into their CI/CD pipelines and add security gates into their builds. This all sounds like a win-win: Now how can you do it?
Implementing quality and security
Successfully shifting security left is a two-fold approach: You must not only ensure that you have the correct tooling and tech stack in place, you must also ensure that you’ve fostered the processes and team culture that support it.
Shift left and integrate
The most effective way to embed SAST early in your SDLC is by integrating it with your test management platform. This integration ensures that quality and security will go hand-in-hand—and make it easy to map traceability of vulnerabilities to test cases and requirements.
Foster a culture of quality through security
Reinforce to your QA team that secure code is a core quality metric, not a separate activity. Treat security findings with the same gravity and urgency as quality defects, and manage them alongside your functional test results—which is also made easier by integrating SAST with test management!
Enact risk-based prioritization
Align vulnerability severity rankings from your SAST tool with your defect tracking in order to prioritize critical quality and security issues simultaneously ahead of release.
Automate at scale
Integrate your SAST tool into your CI/CD pipelines and feed results directly to your test management dashboards for automated security findings.
Get audit-ready
Centralize SAST findings in your test management platform to keep all of your reporting and governance in one audit-ready place.
Shifting left in action with Kiuwan and TestRail
The Kiuwan-TestRail integration is custom-engineered to support your quality-through-security journey. All you need is a Kiuwan account, a TestRail instance, and the free TestRail CLI to start integrating SAST and test management.
Check out this article on the TestRail support center to learn how to get started >
Watch the Kiuwan-TestRail integration demo from our “Quality Through Security in an AI-Driven Era” webinar here:
Self-assessments for continuous improvement
Shifting security left isn’t set-it-and-forget-it—and there’s always room for continuous improvement. Be sure to regularly conduct self-assessments to make sure your DevSecOps processes are in peak shape, reflect on vulnerabilities that made it to release, and incorporate your team’s learnings and feedback.
- Continuous Improvement Mindset: Regularly assess security practices to uncover gaps beyond initial testing.
- Post-Deployment Reviews: Analyze vulnerabilities discovered after release as well as real-world security incidents outside of your product.
- Sample Findings Analysis: Map post-deployment vulnerabilities back to missed SAST/testing checks.
- Root Cause Identification: Determine whether issues stemmed from process, tooling, or human error.
- Incorporate Feedback: Feed lessons learned into requirements, test cases, and SAST rulesets.
Watch the on-demand webinar
Want to dig in deeper? Watch our on-demand webinar, “Quality Through Security in an AI-Driven Era,” for a closer look at shifting quality and security left with Sembi experts, including a demo of the Kiuwan-TestRail integration.
Ready to kick off your shift-left journey? Get a free trial of TestRail and Kiuwan to put what you’ve learned into action and start seeing results today.
