Trends for the DevOps Security : A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Due to technical advances, old ways for securing DevOps software development have become obsolete. Thus, researchers and practitioners need new insights into the security challenges and practices of DevOps development. This paper reviews the data extraction and analysis phase and results of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study that was carried out in 2019. The outcome is an updated list of security challenges and practices for DevOps software development. Both reviews shows that the most essential challenges for the DevOps security deal with the complexity of the development pipelines and the overall complexity of the cloud and microservice environments. The security activities identified were classified by using the BSIMM maturity model for software security as a framework. Our review shows that DevOps security research focuses mostly on deployment phase and technical aspects of software security. We compared the security activities identified in our study with the ones identified by the BSIMM development company in their 2020 review of 128 practitioners’ security practices and found matching practices and similar trends.