Summary
“ In an agile development environment with continuous delivery pipelines, developer velocity is crucial. The real challenge is ensuring developer productivity without negatively impacting secure coding practices. This article looks at developer productivity tools and best practices in application security platforms that can enable speed of deployment without adding unnecessary risk. ”
69% of developers lose more than eight hours each week due to developer inefficiencies, including technical debt and a lack of direction in their work. As this is directly linked to an organization’s ability to meet deadlines, innovate, and maintain high-quality software solutions — and also impacts developer morale and turnover, improving developer productivity has never been more important.
While organizations focus on improving developer productivity and supporting dev teams in increasing velocity — where does security fit into the puzzle?
Unfortunately, in some cases, it gets left by the wayside. This article looks at security from the vantage point of developer productivity, providing best practices for balancing the two with a developer-centric approach to application security.
Why Do Developer Productivity and Security Often Go Head to Head?
In recent years, development teams have adopted DevOps pipelines to accelerate new feature delivery and boost developer productivity. While these approaches are great for developer velocity — they can cause trouble for the security agenda.
According to Gartner, this is something that should be on any organizational agenda, and “organizations that have adopted DevOps to accelerate the development of new applications and services bear the responsibility of scaling security to produce secure and compliant code.” Main challenges include:
- Prioritizing speed over security: With so much pressure to deliver, dev teams may put time-to-market first and security second, or as an afterthought. Ideally, security needs to be continuous and implemented as early as possible in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
- Lack of security skills among developers: Developers are not security experts as their core competency, and so may struggle with the processes, jargon and expectations around security. With knowledge and skills gaps in place, even with the best will in the world — development teams will struggle to implement security.
- Reliance on new Gen AI tools: To ensure developer velocity, many teams are beginning to place a focus on using Gen AI tools to write code snippets and speed up other daily tasks. However, these tools are too new to fully understand the risks, and may invite insecure or malicious code into your environment.
- Poor organizational culture: Traditionally, teams focused on their core discipline, and developers could develop without needing to consider security. That’s no longer the case, and a culture of DevSecOps has become the best practice. This requires communication and collaboration which rely on a mindset and cultural shift.
- Lack of code quality standards: With so many developers using their own frameworks, languages and best practices — misconfigurations and vulnerabilities can slip through the net. Teams need to consider how to enforce secure coding standards across a whole organization, without limiting developer freedom.
Best Practices for Balancing Code Quality with Developer Velocity
To allow for an agile development environment, without sacrificing on security and code quality, developers need to be provided with developer productivity tools that are focused around secure coding practices from day one. These tools should honor best practices including:
Reducing context switching
Frequent context switching disrupts focus and hinders productivity. Developers often juggle multiple tasks—coding, debugging, and fixing security issues—that pull them between different tools and processes. By integrating security tasks directly into their development environment, developers can spot and address vulnerabilities without leaving their workspace. This reduces the mental burden of switching back and forth, helping developers maintain their coding flow and improve overall velocity. Tools that integrate SAST, DAST, SCA, and other security insights directly into development environments allow developers to identify issues in real-time and fix them immediately, fostering a smoother, more productive workflow that doesn’t sacrifice code quality.
Offering guided and Automatic remediation
Providing clear, actionable guidance for fixing vulnerabilities helps developers resolve issues faster and with more confidence, especially as most developers aren’t security experts as their core competency. Guided remediation can offer detailed explanations, best-fix locations, and examples tailored to the identified vulnerabilities.
AI Security Champion
Automatic Remediation for Developers
AI Security Champion creates code that automatically fixes vulnerabilities in your applications.
See how easy it is to get auto-remediation in Visual Studio IDE
This approach prevents guesswork and ensures that security fixes are correctly implemented the first time, reducing the chance of regressions or new vulnerabilities. For an application security platform, guided remediation enables developers to learn and understand secure coding practices while maintaining momentum on their primary tasks. This empowers developers to take ownership of their part of security without compromising productivity or quality.
Encouraging automation
Automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, like code scanning, testing, and deployment, frees developers to focus on more complex coding and problem-solving. Automated developer productivity tools for security, such as SAST, SCA, and DAST scans integrated into CI/CD pipelines, will continuously check for vulnerabilities and accelerate debugging without heavy manual intervention, allowing security checks to keep pace with rapid development cycles.
Automation also improves accuracy and coding quality, as it reduces the risk of human error and ensures security best practices are consistently applied. By embedding security processes into automated workflows, developers can release high-quality, secure code faster and more efficiently.
Supporting a wide range of languages
Developers often work with diverse programming languages, frameworks, and technologies, especially in large or enterprise environments.
An application security platform that supports a wide range of languages allows developers to work seamlessly across projects without having to adjust to a different toolset for each language.
Comprehensive language support also means security teams can apply consistent security standards across the entire codebase, fostering a culture of secure coding across the organization. By reducing compatibility issues and minimizing the need to switch tools, developers can maintain productivity and release secure code, regardless of the language they’re working with.
Securely allowing Gen AI tools
Generative AI tools, such as code assistants, can help developers generate code snippets, debug issues, and identify potential improvements faster.
Allowing developers to securely leverage Gen AI tools can significantly enhance productivity, but it’s essential to ensure that these tools don’t introduce security risks.
By vetting AI tools and integrating them with security checks, developers can safely benefit from AI-driven insights without compromising code integrity. Application security platforms can play a role by enabling the secure use of Gen AI tools, so developers can speed up coding and problem-solving while maintaining high standards of code quality and security.
Checkmarx One is Focused on Developer Productivity Tools from Day One
Checkmarx has a developer-centric approach to application security, recognizing that without developer engagement, security tools can often be ignored or treated as an element of friction between security and development teams.
Checkmarx One embeds security features directly into the tools that developers use every day, including into their Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and CI/CD pipelines. This means that developers can identify and address vulnerabilities early and often, reducing context switching and maintaining velocity throughout. Checkmarx One includes guided and auto-remediation, delivering clear instructions and best-fix locations to help resolve vulnerabilities quickly and easily.
Checkmarx supports an increasingly wide number of programming languages and frameworks, to accommodate a diverse range of development environments, and facilitates the secure use of AI developer productivity tools, scanning AI snippets for malicious intent or vulnerabilities before they can cause harm, and validating that all generated code meets an organization’s security standards.
Together, these features and more ensure that there is an environment of trust fostered between developers and security teams, contributing to risk reduction while empowering developers to be productive and fostering innovation across the software development lifecycle.
See how it works for yourself with a demo of Checkmarx One