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SDL and Agile

One of the challenges that agile development methodologies brought with them is some level of perceived incompatibility with security governance methodologies and SDLs. No matter how you used to integrate security assurance activities with the rest of your engineering efforts, it is likely that Agile messed it up. It almost feels as if agile engineering methodologies had as a primary design goal the disruption of security processes.

But we often want Agile, and we want security too, so the gap has to be bridged. To this end, we need to first understand where the source of the conflict really is, and this also requires understanding where it is not. Understanding the non-issues is important, because there are some elements of agile engineering that are sometimes considered to be contradicting security interests where they really are not; and we would like to focus our efforts where it matters.

We will start by highlighting a few minor issues that are easy to overcome, and then discuss the more fundamental change that may in some cases be required to marry security governance with Agile.

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