Many development teams today operate in a DevOps environment — an agile model that brings development and IT operations into close collaboration. This setup accelerates feature delivery and bug fixes through CI/CD pipelines, Agile methodologies, and open-source tooling. But the same speed that makes DevOps powerful can leave security teams struggling to keep up.
The solution is not to slow down delivery — it’s to move security earlier in the process. Rather than discovering vulnerabilities after deployment, treat every security flaw as a first-class defect inside your DevOps workflow. This approach is the foundation of DevSecOps.
What Is DevSecOps?
DevSecOps integrates security practices directly into the DevOps pipeline — at the planning, coding, building, testing, and deployment stages — rather than treating security as a gate at the end of the release cycle. The goal is to identify and remediate vulnerabilities at the same pace that new code is written.
Inline vs. Out-of-Band Security Activities
Not every security activity can be automated into a pipeline. Understanding the difference between what can run automatically and what requires human expertise is essential to designing a realistic DevSecOps strategy.
Inline Activities
Inline activities are fully automated and can run inside a CI/CD pipeline without human intervention. Examples include:
- Static Application Security Testing (SAST): Analyzes source code for vulnerabilities before the application runs.
- Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST): Tests a running application for vulnerabilities by simulating external attacks.
- Software Composition Analysis (SCA) / Open Source Management: Identifies known vulnerabilities in third-party and open-source dependencies.
Out-of-Band Activities
Out-of-band activities cannot be fully automated. They require human judgment and expertise. Examples include:
- Architecture Risk Analysis (ARA): Identifies technical risks arising from design-level flaws in a system’s architecture.
- Threat Modeling: Maps out the attack surface of a system to identify and prioritize potential threats.
- Manual Code Review: Human review of source code for logic errors, business-logic vulnerabilities, and subtle security flaws that automated tools miss.
While most inline activities can also be performed out-of-band when needed, the reverse is not true — there is currently no reliable way to fully automate architecture risk analysis or manual code review. Both require human expertise to be meaningful.
Security Must Be Treated Like Quality
Security issues should carry the same weight as functional quality requirements. Just as a CI/CD pipeline should break the build when unit tests fail or code doesn’t compile, it should also break when security thresholds are crossed. A broken build triggers notifications and, depending on the nature of the failure, may kick off out-of-band activities such as threat modeling or a manual code review.
“It’s important to have the capability to break the build when security issues arise. Developers need solutions and capabilities that identify and flag the problem early so that a timely fix can be introduced without delay.”
Olli Jarva, Senior Solutions Architect, Synopsys Singapore
When to Break the Build for Security
The first practical step is defining the rule sets that will break a build. Only inline (automated) activities can break the build — out-of-band activities, by definition, are manual and cannot block a pipeline automatically. Common criteria for breaking a build include:
- Exceeding a configured threshold for critical-severity vulnerabilities.
- Exceeding a configured threshold for high-severity vulnerabilities.
- Detecting a specific high-risk vulnerability class, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS).
- Identifying a zero-day or publicly disclosed vulnerability in a dependency (e.g., a critical Apache Struts issue detected by an SCA tool).
- SAST scan results showing that one or more source files failed to compile, which significantly reduces confidence in the completeness and accuracy of the scan.
- SAST or DAST tools running out of memory, which can produce incomplete or unreliable results.
This list is not exhaustive, but it provides a solid baseline. The overall goal is to prevent insecure code from quietly passing through the pipeline and reaching production.
Team Responsibilities in a DevSecOps Pipeline
Embedding security into CI/CD requires coordination across three teams. Each has a distinct role:
Security Team
- Select, configure, and integrate security tools into the build pipeline.
- Define the rules and thresholds that trigger a broken build.
- Maintain a dynamic record of outstanding security defects and their remediation status.
DevOps Team
- Assist the security team in implementing build-breaking logic within pipeline infrastructure.
- Notify development teams when a build breaks and provide clear context about the specific reason.
Development Team
- Respond to broken builds by investigating and remediating the identified security issues.
- Treat security defects with the same urgency as functional bugs.
Key Takeaways
- DevSecOps shifts security left — catching vulnerabilities earlier, when they are cheapest to fix.
- Automated inline security tools (SAST, DAST, SCA) should be wired directly into your CI/CD pipeline.
- Human-driven out-of-band activities (ARA, threat modeling, manual code review) complement automation but cannot replace it.
- Build-breaking rules for security issues must be deliberately defined, not left to defaults.
- Security, DevOps, and development teams must share ownership of the pipeline’s security posture.
Security is too important to treat as an afterthought. By integrating it directly into the CI/CD pipeline — and empowering every team to take ownership — organizations can move fast without sacrificing the safety of their applications and infrastructure.