Risk Analysis in Software Development
Risk analysis is one of the most important parts of software development. On the one hand, it is a business-level tool that serves as a possibility to ensure that all the decisions are supported by evidence. On the other hand, they provide the developers with critical information regarding the vulnerabilities of the developed software and may protect the team from being exposed to numerous threats (Merkow & Raghavan, 2010). There are several advantages and disadvantages that can be associated with risk-analysis methodologies. Within the framework of modern software design, developers have to deal with quite a few limitations, so it is critical to analyze risks before getting to the development process. In other words, the ability to take into consideration typical risk definitions may be one of the core characteristics of high-quality software and efficient software risk assessment. In order to perform eminent risk assessment, the developers have to identify, rank, and mitigate all the risks that they find throughout the way. Overall, risk analysis is a complex process that has to be completed step by step so as to go in line with the development lifecycle.
The two categories of evidence that the results of risk analysis have to dwell on include initial requirements and testing. Due to the multifaceted nature of risk analysis, it cannot be performed solely by the design team (Highsmith, 2013). It is a specialized subject that requires the understanding of business influence, legal proceedings, and the business model that has to be integrated into the software. This kind of approach allows the team to make assumptions when necessary and prevent the escalation of risks. During the next step, security specialists go through the list of assumptions completed by the team and compile a revised version of the list that consists of the most critical instances of threats. Nonetheless, modern software design hardly aligns with the traditional views of risk analysis. This is why the predictions are expected to provide statistically relevant results that can serve as a platform for the future risk mitigation (Davis, 2013). It is safe to say that software design should be one of the key aspects facilitating the process of risk analysis. Knowing that not a single software application is safe when it comes to vulnerabilities, one should perceive risk assessment as a tool that impacts the reputation of developers. All of the potential threats can be identified by means of decomposing the application and dividing it into a series of major components. The significance of risk analysis cannot be underestimated because it influences software development even at the architectural level.
Software Development Outsourcing
It is a rather common situation when highly technical development environments are subject to outsourcing. Nonetheless, this kind of approach tends to intensify the issues. Even if not taking into consideration the issues with management, the problem of communication becomes a key challenge for the majority of project managers that have to deal with outsourcing. One of the ways to mitigate the issues of software development outsourcing is to align the development practice with a testing framework (Clarke & O’Connor, 2012). Regardless of the size of the project, the outsourcing party can comply with the initial schedule and instructions by means of referring to the original testing framework from time to time. When a company needs to outsource, developing such framework should become an essential component of the project. On a bigger scale, such approach is going to validate the original design and all the milestones created by the developers. There may be other problems transpiring throughout the process of outsourcing because the core two reasons for the latter are saving money and time.
This may negatively affect the development of software design and outshine the significance of working code. The concept of software development lifecycle (SDLC) can accommodate outsourcing only in the case where a number of crucial points are taken into consideration. For instance, the developers may be interested in implementing certain security activities that would safeguard the application on the way from requirements to the final release. According to Paul (2011), the choice of SDLC models should be conducted throughout the requirements phase so as to perform a number of decomposition activities. From the point of view of security and resiliency needs, the concepts that have to be addressed first include data classification, subject-object modeling, and threat modeling. This kind of support of the SDLC facilitates the process of completing security activities.
It also hints at the fact that the development phase has to include recurrent code inspections because, without software assurance controls, proper software development outsourcing is impossible (Volter, Stahl, Bettin, Haase, & Helsen, 2013). Throughout the testing phase of SDLC, the team has to evaluate the efficiency of the existing software assurance controls and perform regression testing. Another important issue that has to be addressed by outsourcing software developers is the concept of user acceptance. It has to be one of the most important factors in terms of both functionality and security. SDLC has to be supported by numerous deployment activities in order to ensure that the essential components of the software development process are secured. All the developed software items have to undergo post-deployment certification to become valid and vulnerability-proof. In this particular case, all the associated data shall be either archived or disposed of in order to protect the developed software.
References
Clarke, P., & O’Connor, R. V. (2012). The situational factors that affect the software development process: Towards a comprehensive reference framework. Information and Software Technology, 54(5), 433-447.
Davis, A. (2013). Just enough requirements management: Where software development meets marketing. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Highsmith, J. (2013). Adaptive software development: A collaborative approach to managing complex systems. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Merkow, M. S., & Raghavan, L. (2010). Secure and resilient software development. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Paul, M. (2011). Software security in a flat world. ICS2. Web.
Volter, M., Stahl, T., Bettin, J., Haase, A., & Helsen, S. (2013). Model-driven software development: Technology, engineering, management. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.