A Security Practices Evaluation Framework

Software development teams need guidance on choosing security practices so they can develop code securely. The academic and practitioner literature on software development security practices is large, and expanding. However, published empirical evidence for security practice use in software development is limited and fragmented, making choosing appropriate practices difficult. Measurement frameworks offer a tool for collecting and comparing software engineering data. The goal of this work is to aid software practitioners in evaluating security practice use in the development process by defining and validating a measurement framework for software development security practice use and outcomes. We define the Security Practices Evaluation Framework (SP-EF), a measurement framework for software development security practices. SP-EF supports evidence-based practice selection. To enable comparison of practices across publications and projects, we define an ontology of software development security practices. We evaluate the framework and ontology on historical data and industrial projects.