The Secure Software Development Lifecycle process is covered under Domain 4, which represents 17 percent of the CCSP certification exam. Streamlined and secure application development requires a consistent methodology and a well-defined process of getting from concept to finished product. SDLC is the series of steps that is followed to build, modify, and maintain computing software.

Business requirements

Your organization’s business requirements should be a key consideration whenever you develop new software or even when you modify existing applications. You should make sure that you have a firm understanding of your organization’s goals (overall and specific to your project) and knowledge of the end-user’s needs and expectations.

It’s important to gather input from as many stakeholders as possible as early as possible to support the success of your application. Gathering requirements from relevant leaders and business units across your organization is crucial to ensuring that you don’t waste development cycles on applications or features that don’t meet the needs of your business.

These business requirements are a critical input into the SDLC.

SDLC phases

While the SDLC process has multiple different variations, it most commonly includes the steps, or phases:
  • Planning
  • Defining
  • Designing
  • Developing
  • Testing
  • Deploying and maintaining
diagram showing the software development lifecyle overview

There’s a good chance that you will see at least one question related to the SDLC on your exam. Remember that the titles of each phase may vary slightly from one methodology to the next, but make sure that you have a strong understanding of the overall flow and the order of operations.

Although none of the stages specifically reference security, it is important that you consider security at each and every step of the SDLC process. Waiting until later stages of the process can introduce unnecessary security risks, which can add unforeseen costs and extend your project timeline.

SDLC Planning phase

The Planning phase is the most fundamental stage of the SDLC and is sometimes called Requirements Gathering. During this initial phase, the project scope is established and high-level requirements are gathered to support the remaining lifecycle phases. The project team should work with senior leadership and all project stakeholders to create the overall project timeline and identify project costs and resources required.

During the Planning phase, you must consider all requirements and desired features and conduct a cost-benefit analysis to determine the potential financial impact versus the proposed value to the end-user. Using all the information that you gather during this phase, you should then validate the economic and technical feasibility of proceeding with the project.

The Planning phase is where risks should initially be identified. Your project team should consider what may go wrong and how you can mitigate, or lower, the impact of those risks. For example, imagine that you’re building an online banking application. As part of the Planning phase, you should not only consider all functional requirements of such an application, but also security and compliance requirements, such as satisfying PCI DSS. Consider what risks currently exist within your organization (or your cloud environment) that might get in the way of demonstrating PCI DSS and then plan ways to address those risks.

SDLC Defining phase

You may also see this phase referred to as Requirements Analysis. During the Defining phase, you use all the business requirements, feasibility studies, and stakeholder input from the Planning phase to document clearly defined product requirements. Your product requirements should provide full details of the specific features and functionality of your proposed application. These requirements will ultimately feed your design decisions, so it needs to be as thorough as possible.

In addition, during this phase you must define the specific hardware and software requirements required for your development team — identify what type of dev environment is needed, designate your programming language, and define all technical resources needed to complete the project.

This phase is where you should specifically define all your application security requirements and identify the tools and resources necessary to develop those accordingly. You should be thinking about where encryption is required, what type of access control features are needed, and what requirements you have for maintaining your code’s integrity.

SDLC Designing phase

The Designing phase is where you take your product requirements and software specifications and turn them into an actual design plan, often called a design specification document. This design plan is then used during the next phase to guide the actual development and implementation of your application.

During the Designing phase, your developers, systems architects, and other technical staff create the high-level system and software design to meet each identified requirement. Your mission during this phase is to design the overall software architecture and create a plan that identifies the technical details of your application’s design. In cloud development, this phase includes defining the required amount of CPU cores, RAM, and bandwidth, while also identifying which cloud services are required for full functionality of your application. This component is critical because it may identify a need for your organization to provision additional cloud resources. Your design should define all software components that need to be created, interconnections with third-party systems, the front-end user interface, and all data flows (both within the application and between users and the application).

At this stage of the SDLC, you should also conduct threat modeling exercises and integrate your risk mitigation decisions (from the Planning phase) into your formal designs. In other words, you want to fully identify potential risks.

SDLC Developing phase

Software developers, rejoice! After weeks or even months of project planning, you can finally write some code! During this phase of the SDLC, your development team breaks up the work documented in previous steps into pieces (or modules) that are coded individually. Database developers create the required data storage architecture, front-end developers create the interface that users will interact with, and back-end developers code all the behind-the-scenes inner-workings of the application. This phase is typically the longest of the SDLC, but if the previous steps are followed carefully, it can be the least complicated part of the whole process.

During this phase, developers should conduct peer reviews of each other’s code to check for flaws, and each individual module should be unit tested to verify its functionality prior to being rolled into the larger project. Some development teams skip this part and struggle mightily to debug flaws once an application is completed.

In addition to conducting functional testing of each module, the time is right to begin security testing. Your organization should conduct static code analysis and security scanning of each module before integration into the project. Failure to do so may allow individual software vulnerabilities to get lost in the overall codebase, and multiple individual security flaws may combine to present a larger aggregate risk, or combined risk.

SDLA Testing phase

Once the code is fully developed, the application enters the Testing phase. During this phase, application testers seek to verify whether the application functions as desired and according to the documented requirements; the ultimate goal here is to uncover all flaws within the application and report those flaws to the developers for patching. This cyclical process continues until all product requirements have been validated and all flaws have been fixed.

As a completed application, security testers have more tools at their disposal to uncover security flaws. Instead of relying solely on static code analysis, testers can use dynamic analysis to identify flaws that occur only when the code is executed.

The Testing phase is one of the most crucial phases of the SDLC, as it is the main gate between your development team and customers. Testing should be conducted in accordance with an application testing plan that identifies what and how to test. Management and relevant stakeholders should carefully review and approve your testing plan before testing begins.

Deploying and maintaining

Once the application has passed the Testing phase, it is ready to be deployed for customer use. There are often multiple stages of deployment (Alpha, Beta, and General Availability are common ones), each with its own breadth of deployment (for example, alpha releases tend to be deployed to select customers, whereas general availability means it’s ready for everyone).

Once applications have been tested and successfully deployed, they enter a maintenance phase where they’re continually monitored and updated. During the Maintaining phase, the production software undergoes an ongoing cycle of the SDLC process, where security patches and other updates go through the same planning, defining, designing, developing, testing, and deploying activities discussed in the preceding sections.

Many SDLC models include a separate phase for disposal or termination, which happens when an application is no longer needed or supported. From a security perspective, you should keep in mind that data (including portions of applications) may remain in cloud environments even after deletion. Consult your contracts and SLAs for commitments that your CSP makes for data deletion.

Methodologies

Although the steps within the SDLC remain largely constant, several SDLC methodologies, or models, exist, and each approaches these steps in slightly different ways. Two of the most commonly referenced and used methodologies are waterfall and agile.

Waterfall

Waterfall is the oldest and most straightforward SDLC methodology. In this model, you complete one phase and then continue on to the next — you move in sequential order, flowing through every step of the cycle from beginning to end. Each phase of this model relies on successful completion of the previous phase; there’s no going back, because... well, because waterfalls don’t flow up.

Some advantages of the waterfall methodology include

  • It’s simple to manage and easy to follow.
  • Tracking and measuring progress is easy because you have a clearly defined end state early on.
  • The measure twice, cut once approach allows applications to be developed based upon a more complete understanding of all requirements and deliverables from the start.
  • The process can largely occur without customer intervention after requirements are initially gathered. Customers and developers agree on desired outcomes early in the project.
Some challenges that come with waterfall include
  • It’s rigid. Requirements must be fully developed early in the process and are difficult to change once the design has been completed.
  • Products may take longer to deliver compared to more iterative models, like agile.
  • It relies very little on the customer or end-user, which may make some customers feel left out.
  • Testing is delayed until late in the process, which may allow small issues to build up into larger ones before they’re detected.

Agile

Agile is more of the new kid on the block, having been introduced in the 1990s. In this model, instead of proceeding in a linear and sequential fashion, development and testing activities occur simultaneously and cyclically.

Application development is separated into sprints that produce a succession of releases that each improves upon the previous release. With the agile model, the goal is to move quickly and to fail fast — create your first release, test it, fix it, and create your next release fast!

Some advantages of the agile methodology include

  • It’s flexible. You can move from one phase to the next without worrying that the previous phase isn’t perfect or complete.
  • Time to market is much quicker than waterfall.
  • It’s very user-focused; the customer has frequent opportunities to give feedback on the application.
  • Risks may be reduced because the iterative nature of agile allows you get feedback and conduct testing early and often.
Some challenges that come with Agile include
  • It can be challenging to apply in real-life projects, especially larger projects with many stakeholders and components.
  • The product end-state is less predictable than waterfall. With agile, you iterate until you’re happy with the result.
  • It requires a very high level of collaboration and frequent communication between developers, customers, and other stakeholders. This challenge can be a pro, but sometimes has a negative impact on developers and project timelines.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Arthur J. Deane is a security and compliance executive at Google. He is a technical professional with 13+ years experience in information security, cloud security, IT risk management, and systems engineering.

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