“Process” is often seen as a antithetical to the fast-moving nature of startups; security processes, in particular, can be regarded as a direct impediment to shipping cool features. On the other hand, the security of an organization and its users shouldn’t be disregarded for
the sake of speed. Striking a balance between security and nimble development is a vital aspect of a security (in particular, application security) team. At Slack, we have implemented a secure development process which has both accelerated development and allowed us to scale our small team to cover the features of a rapidly growing engineering organization.
In this presentation we will discuss both our Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) process and tooling, as well as view metrics and provide analysis of how the process has worked thus far. We intend to open-source our tooling as a supplement to this presentation, and offer advice for others wishing to attempt similar implementations. We'll discuss our deployment of a flexible framework for security reviews, including a lightweight self-service assessment tool, a checklist generator, and most importantly a chat-based process that meets people where they are already working. We’ll show how it’s possible to encourage a security mindset among developers, while avoiding an adversarial relationship. By tracking data from multiple sources, we can also view the quantified success of such an approach and show how it can be applied in other organizations.
