How to Use DevSecOps Automation for Safety-Critical Software Development
DevSecOps automation is key for safety-critical software development. Here we explain what is DevSecOps automation and why it is important for safety-critical software.
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Back to topWhat Is DevSecOps Automation?
DevSecOps automation is the practice of building in security processes at every stage of the software development lifecycle, using automated tools and best practices to streamline development, security, and operations.
DevSecOps is a popular software development practice for automation, shortening feedback times, and ensuring secure software development.
Back to topGet DevOps Automation Best Practices
Learn how to implement a successful DevOps automation process in our recent white paper.
Challenges in Safety-Critical Software Development
There are — of course — specific challenges in safety-critical software development.
Many of these are defined by industry-specific functional-safety standards. Each of these has a set of core requirements that helps enable you to produce safe software.
Functional-safety standards require you to:
- Know exactly what it is that has been delivered.
- Know how the final deliverables were produced.
- Produce documentation to reflect what has been delivered and how it has been put together.
- Be able to reproduce the deliverables and all related verification and validation work products.
You need a controlled, reliable, repeatable, and — ideally — automated set of delivery processes to demonstrate compliance.
Automating DevSecOps processes champions the same basic principles. And it can solve these challenges in software development where ensuring safety is critical.
Back to topDevSecOps Automation and CI/CD
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are important to automating DevSecOps .
CI typically improves the quality of the codebase by breaking up the tasks into small chunks and performing code integrations frequently. Each integration kicks off an automated build and test process to expose any defects and report status as quickly as possible.
As adoption of shift-left strategies, including shift-left security, continues to grow, CI/CD capabilities within static analysis tools help to automate the DevSecOps process, empowering teams to adopt a shift-left approach faster, more accurately, and at scale. And while CI/CD makes writing and testing code more secure, system hardening enforces controls at the server, application, and OS levels for fully secure automated DevSecOps processes.
Both Perforce Static Analysis tools, Klocwork and Helix QAC, have full CI/CD integration capabilities with the flexibility teams need for modern DevSecOps automation. By using tools that automate DevSecOps processes, development teams are able to find and fix issues earlier in the development lifecycle and go to market faster.
4 Benefits of Continuous Integration For Safety-Critical Software
Here are the top benefits of CI for developing safety-critical software.
Identifies Problems Sooner
This makes it easier for the developers to fix them. It increases the likelihood that the issue will be fixed correctly. This results in a build that’s error-free and operational.
Encourages Small, Modular Changes to the Code
This helps to ensure that new functionality can be backed out of a release more quickly, or even prevented from entering the main code stream altogether. This minimizes the impact of an issue on other developers.
Detects Issues ASAP
CI enables developers, through automation, to detect as many issues as possible in each integration build. This increases the breadth, depth, and repeatability of the tests. It also reduces the need for manual testing.
Automated Repeatable Tasks
It provides automation of the repeated tasks, which allows developers to focus on features.
Back to topBenefits of DevSecOps Automation
The most significant benefits of DevOps automation as a whole are:
- Decreased development and operations costs.
- Shorter development cycles.
- Increased release velocity.
- Improved defect detection.
- Reduced deployment failures and rollbacks.
- Reduced time to recover upon failure
📕 Related Resource: Learn more about 3 Examples of Automation in DevOps
Benefits of DevSecOps Automation For Safety-Critical Software
Safety-critical software benefits from DevSecOps automation in:
- Repeatability is the notion that tests may be rerun at any time. Provided that the behavior of the software (or the tests) have not changed, the results of two individual executions should be identical.
- Independence is the concept of ensuring that each test case within a suite of test cases is not influenced by the prior test cases. This ensures that the results could only be created by a specific test case and not influenced by the tests run previously.
DevSecOps Automation Tools
Automating DevSecOps processes helps to ensure that your code development process is free from coding errors and bugs. An essential part of that process is using a SAST tool — like Klocwork — to detect these vulnerabilities.
By regularly using a SAST tool provides you with the following benefits:
- Automated vulnerability detection
- Vulnerability elimination
- Development velocity
- Ease of integration
And, SAST tools are able to examine the code quickly, which reduces the amount of disruption to the software development cycle.
Choose Perforce Static Analysis for Safety-Critical Software Development and DevSecOps Automation
Klocwork and Helix QAC help you automate DevSecOps processes for software development. Both tools enforces functional safety standards and delivers the benefits of automation.
In addition, Klocwork and Helix QAC:
- Detect code vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and rule violations earlier in development. This helps to accelerate code reviews as well as the manual testing efforts of developers.
- Enforce industry and coding standards, including CWE, CERT, and OWASP.
- Report on compliance over time and across product versions.
See for yourself why Klocwork and Helix QAC are the best static code analyzers for automating DevSecOps processes. Register for a free trial.
