Biblio
"Moving fast, and breaking things", instead of "being safe and secure", is the credo of the IT industry. However, if we look at the wide societal impact of IT security incidents in the past years, it seems like it is no longer sustainable. Just like in the case of Equifax, people simply forget updates, just like in the case of Maersk, companies do not use sufficient network segmentation. Security certification does not seem to help with this issue. After all, Equifax was IS027001 compliant.In this paper, we take a look at how we handle and (do not) learn from security incidents in IT security. We do this by comparing IT security incidents to early and later aviation safety. We find interesting parallels to early aviation safety, and outline the governance levers that could make the world of IT more secure, which were already successful in making flying the most secure way of transportation.
Agile methods frequently have difficulties with qualities, often specifying quality requirements as stories, e.g., "As a user, I need a safe and secure system." Such projects will generally schedule some capability releases followed by safety and security releases, only to discover user-developer misunderstandings and unsecurable agile code, leading to project failure. Very large agile projects also have further difficulties with project velocity and scalability. Examples are trying to use daily standup meetings, 2-week sprints, shared tacit knowledge vs. documents, and dealing with user-developer misunderstandings. At USC, our Parallel Agile, Executable Architecture research project shows some success at mid-scale (50 developers). We also examined several large (hundreds of developers) TRW projects that had succeeded with rapid, high-quality development. The paper elaborates on their common Critical Quality Factors: a concurrent 3-team approach, an empowered Keeper of the Project Vision, and a management approach emphasizing qualities.