Securing any development framework—whether Waterfall, Agile, or DevOps—requires changes to culture, process, and technology. In traditional Waterfall delivery, security was bolted on at the end. DevOps changes the release cadence so dramatically that a bolt-on approach simply breaks down: by the time a security review is scheduled, the code is already in production.
As Securosis analyst Adrian Lane has noted, Agile development includes “whatever work gets done in a sprint and does not bend to security, so you need to bend security to fit Agile.” The same principle applies to DevOps: moving toward DevSecOps means embedding security controls and culture throughout the entire development lifecycle rather than treating security as a gate at the end.
The following five strategies—originally outlined by Veracode expert Colin Domoney—offer a practical starting point for teams looking to integrate security into their DevOps workflows.
1. Establish Strong Feedback Loops
Gene Kim’s “Three Ways” of DevOps emphasize systems thinking, amplifying feedback, and a culture of continuous experimentation and learning. All three principles apply directly to security.
Strong feedback loops between development and security teams ensure that vulnerabilities discovered late in the pipeline—or in production—are quickly communicated back to the developers who can fix them. Practically, this means:
- Integrating Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools into the CI/CD pipeline so results are visible to developers immediately after a commit.
- Routing security scan results into the same dashboards and ticketing systems developers already use (e.g., Jira, GitHub Issues) rather than separate security portals.
- Holding brief, regular sync meetings between security engineers and development leads to discuss emerging threats and remediation priorities.
The goal is to make the cost of fixing a vulnerability as low as possible by surfacing it as close to introduction as possible—ideally during local development or the first CI build.
2. Perform Regular Security-Focused Code Reviews
Code reviews are already a standard practice in high-performing engineering teams. Adding a security lens to those reviews is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-cost interventions available.
Key approaches include:
- Security champions: Designate one or two developers per team who receive additional security training and serve as the first line of review for security-sensitive changes (authentication, authorization, data handling, cryptography).
- Checklist-driven reviews: Maintain a short, team-specific security checklist based on your most common vulnerability classes (e.g., OWASP Top 10 items relevant to your stack). Checklists reduce cognitive load and improve consistency.
- Pair reviews for high-risk changes: Any pull request touching session management, secrets handling, or third-party integrations should require sign-off from both a peer developer and a security champion.
Regular code reviews also build institutional knowledge: developers learn secure coding patterns from each other organically, reducing the total number of vulnerabilities introduced over time.
3. Run Security Exercises to Build a Culture of Awareness
Culture is often the hardest part of any DevSecOps transformation. Security exercises make learning engaging and help teams internalize threat modeling in a way that abstract policies never will.
Effective formats include:
- Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions: Teams compete to exploit intentionally vulnerable applications or solve security puzzles. CTFs build practical offensive skills that help developers understand attacker thinking.
- Red team / blue team exercises: A red team attempts to compromise a system while a blue team defends it. Even a lightweight internal version—using a staging environment—reveals assumptions about your real attack surface.
- Threat modeling workshops: Walking through the STRIDE model or a simple data-flow diagram for a new feature helps developers ask “what could go wrong?” before writing a single line of code.
- Tabletop incident simulations: Simulate a breach or a critical vulnerability disclosure and walk through the response process. Identifying gaps in procedures before a real incident is far less costly than discovering them during one.
Friendly competition and shared learning create the psychological safety needed for developers to raise security concerns early, without fear of slowing down a sprint.
4. Measure and Benchmark Security Performance
DevOps is a data-driven discipline. Teams track deployment frequency, lead time, mean time to recovery, and change failure rate. Security deserves the same treatment.
Useful security metrics to track alongside traditional DevOps KPIs include:
- Mean time to remediate (MTTR) vulnerabilities by severity class.
- Vulnerability introduction rate: How many new vulnerabilities are found per sprint or per thousand lines of code?
- Open vulnerability backlog age: How long do known vulnerabilities sit unresolved?
- Percentage of builds passing security gates in the CI/CD pipeline.
- Dependency currency: What proportion of third-party libraries are within a supported, patched version?
Sharing these metrics transparently with development teams—not just the security team—reinforces accountability and gives developers a concrete way to see the impact of their secure coding efforts over time. Trend data is especially valuable: a declining vulnerability introduction rate is a meaningful signal that training and tooling investments are working.
5. Define Clear Procedures for Handling Security Problems
No matter how strong your preventive controls, incidents and vulnerability disclosures will happen. Having documented, rehearsed procedures in place dramatically reduces response time and limits blast radius.
Procedures every DevSecOps team should define and test include:
- Rollback runbooks: Developers should know exactly how to roll back a deployment to a known-good version without escalating to senior engineers. Automated rollback triggers (e.g., on a spike in error rate or a failed health check) are even better.
- Canary release strategy: Deploy new code to a small subset of users or traffic first. Monitor security telemetry—not just uptime—before promoting to full production. This limits exposure if a vulnerability is introduced.
- Escalation paths: Define when and how a developer escalates a potential security issue to the security team. Ambiguity in escalation paths leads to vulnerabilities being silently ignored or incorrectly triaged.
- Vulnerability disclosure policy: Establish how your team handles externally reported vulnerabilities, including acknowledgment timelines and patch SLAs by severity.
- Break-glass procedures: For critical zero-day vulnerabilities, define an expedited process that bypasses normal change management while preserving an audit trail.
Well-defined procedures reduce panic and decision fatigue during a real incident, allowing your team to focus on containment and remediation rather than process improvisation.
Putting It All Together: The DevSecOps Mindset
None of these strategies requires purchasing an expensive platform or hiring a large security team before you can start. Most can be adopted incrementally within existing sprint cycles. The common thread across all five is shared ownership: security is not a gate operated by a separate team, but a property of the system that everyone is responsible for maintaining.
Start by picking the one strategy your team is furthest from and treat it as a sprint goal. Measure the before and after. Then move to the next. That iterative, metrics-driven approach is, after all, exactly what DevOps teaches us.
This article is based on guidance originally published by Veracode and attributed to Veracode expert Colin Domoney. Original source: veracode.com.