2022 Software Security Survey Analysis

2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report

• The report, sponsored by Google Cloud and Deloitte, analyzed data from 33,000 professionals over eight years.
• Key metrics for software delivery performance are deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service.
• Operational performance is measured by reliability.
• Organizational performance is measured by how well an organization meets performance and profitability goals.
• The report explores factors like burnout, employee recommendations of their teams, and organizational and team culture.
• Supply chain security is a major theme, with a focus on technical and cultural practices. High-trust, low-blame cultures focused on performance, in comparison to low-trust, high-blame cultures focused on power or rules, were 1.6x more likely to adopt successful security practices.
• Cloud usage and reliability are predictive of organizational performance, with organizations using private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, or a mixture of clouds having higher organizational performance than those using on-premises servers.
• High software delivery performance is beneficial to organizational performance only when operational performance is also high.
• Implementing software supply chain security controls, like those recommended by the SLSA framework, has a positive effect on software delivery performance when continuous integration is established.
• The impact of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices is non-linear; it doesn't positively affect reliability until a team reaches a certain level of SRE maturity.
• Teams that recognize the need for continuous improvement tend to have higher organizational performance.

Demographics and Firmographics

• 85% of respondents work in development or engineering teams, DevOps or SRE teams, IT operations or infrastructure teams or are managers.
• Respondents worked in teams with 5 or fewer people, 8 or fewer people and 12 or fewer people.
• 89% of respondents came from 22 countries.
• Significant numbers of respondents worked in financial services and industrial/manufacturing companies.

Methodology

• The study used a cross-sectional, theory-based design.
• The target population comprised practitioners and leaders familiar with DevOps.
• The research used snowball sampling and email lists to gather responses.
• Latent constructs were derived from theory, definitions, and expert input.
• Hierarchical clustering was used to analyze data, including data on deployment frequency, lead time, service restoration time, and change failure rate.
• Multinomial logistic regression was used to understand factors that influence cluster membership.
• Linear regression was used to analyze the relationship between cluster membership and outcomes like burnout, unplanned work, and organizational performance.

This quiz explores the main themes related to software security identified in the 2022 survey. Participants will assess their understanding of current trends and issues in the realm of software security based on recent findings.