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Tag: application development

  • 5 Reasons Why Your App Needs an Error Monitoring System

    5 Reasons Why Your App Needs an Error Monitoring System

    All software applications have errors. Bugs are simply part of software development. That’s why engineering organizations need to know exactly what errors are occurring so decisions can be made around which bugs to fix.

    The fastest way to identify and fix application errors is to implement error monitoring software. However, not all solutions are created equal, and the best error monitoring systems do more than error alerting. They provide insights into the stability of the software, give developers metrics for addressing technical debt and enable better decision making around building features versus fixing bugs.

    The result? Happier developers who build better apps that match customer expectations.

    Here are five specific reasons why engineering organizations should adopt an error monitoring system.

    Error Monitoring Improves Application Health

    At its core, an error monitoring system addresses the challenge to find, fix and prioritize software bugs. However, what makes an error monitoring solution stand out is stability scores, which make it easier to maintain a healthy app.

    • Calculated with real-time error rates and session data, stability scores reflect the percentage of successful user interactions per release. 
    • They tell the real story about the impact of errors and technical debt and provide a single, unifying metric that speaks directly to the overall application health.
    • Stability scores can be used across teams to set stability targets (critical stability and target stability), which in turn can determine whether the app is healthy enough for building new features, or if it’s time to fix bugs.

    An Error Monitoring Solution Increases Team Productivity

    With a lack of detailed information about the source and factors contributing to a bug or crash, developers must conduct research to pinpoint errors, which is a time-intensive process.

    Without Error Monitoring With Error Monitoring
    Sixty percent of developer time wasted investigating and fixing errors, often in code they didn’t write. Forty percent increase in developer productivity with the exact location and source of the error provided by error monitoring solution.

    From detection to resolution, error monitoring with stability scores determines whether debugging needs to be part of the workload and which errors should be addressed first. In addition, the best error monitoring tools help prioritize business-critical and revenue-impacting errors to ensure alignment from top to bottom within an organization.

    Understanding Your Application Errors Can Reduce Costs and Increase Revenue

    With an error monitoring service that catches errors quickly, engineers save time, avoid critical errors and deliver crash-free applications that users want to spend money on. New features can also be rolled out on time with fewer errors, which makes developers and users happy. 

    • On average, companies lose $1,500 per engineer each month over debugging.
    • Knight Capital Group lost $440 million in a mere 30 minutes due to a software bug.

    Technical issues are the number one reason apps get deleted. Thankfully, companies that deliver smooth app experiences benefit from loyal users who trust and spend money on their brand.

    Error Monitoring Retains Development Talent and Boosts Morale

    Technical debt is hard on engineers, both from a productivity and emotional perspective. Without a common language to explain its impact to other teams, developers often become frustrated at bearing the burden of technical debt, which can cause disengagement and encourage developers to leave.

    Error monitoring management and stability scores bring complete visibility and cross-team agreement around software stability and prioritization of errors. Stability scores provide:

    • A common vernacular for discussion between engineering, product, QA and release teams about when it’s time to fix bugs versus build new features.
    • A metrics-driven reflection of the impact of technical debt on the product and clear demonstration about when it’s time to address it.
    • A singular goal for application stability, which turns development and product teams into allies and increases morale across the organization.

    Error Handling Impacts User Satisfaction and Usage, and Safeguards App Store Ratings

    Apps play an important role in our personal and professional lives. Widespread app adoption and daily usage point to why application errors are becoming unacceptable to users, who aren’t shy about speaking up when errors do occur. 

    • Ninety- six percent of mobile app users write bad reviews for sub-par apps.
    • Forty-two percent of 0-star app ratings in the Google Play Store mention app stability and bugs.

    The best way to ensure users have a positive customer experience is to use error monitoring to catch errors in real-time so you can respond immediately. Error monitoring provides a hope for avoiding poor app store ratings and for keeping customers satisfied.

  • Report: Debugging Efforts Cost Companies $61B Annually

    Report: Debugging Efforts Cost Companies $61B Annually

    Undo, a provider of a software failure replay platform, this week published a report in collaboration with a Cambridge Judge Business School MBA project that estimates 620 million developer hours a year are wasted on debugging software failures, at a cost of roughly $61 billion.

    The report also notes software engineers spend on average of 13 hours to fix a single software failure.

    According to the report, 41% said identified reproducing a bug as the biggest barrier to finding and fixing bugs faster, followed by wiring tests (23%) and actually fixing the bug (23%). Well over half (56%) said they could release software one to two days faster if reproducing failures were not an issue. Just over a quarter of developer time (26%) is spent reproducing and fixing failing tests.

    On the plus side, 88% of respondents said their organizations have adopted continuous integration (CI) practices, with more than 50% of businesses reporting they can deploy new code changes and updates at least daily. Over a third (35%) said they can make hourly deployments.

    Undo CEO Barry Morris said the report makes it clear organizations need to be able to record software to reduce the amount of time it takes to find bugs. Unfortunately, even then finding a bug is still a labor-intensive process that can involve analyzing millions of lines of code. In the future, software replay systems will be infused with machine learning algorithms to accelerate the bug discovery process, he noted. As software becomes more instrumented, the observability data and metrics that machine learning algorithms require to detect patterns is becoming more accessible.

    In the meantime, while CI has been embraced, the continuous delivery (CD) side of the DevOps equation remains a challenge. Each platform software is deployed on is unique, so most organizations find automating software delivery problematic.

    Regardless of DevOps approach, it’s clear there’s still lots of room for improvement when it comes to developing software. Even the most advanced practitioners of DevOps are limited by the rate at which software bugs, including security flaws, can be discovered and remediated. Of course, there may come a day when machine learning algorithms automate much of that process, including determining which types of tests to run. For now, however, many organizations could streamline the software debugging process by recording instances of applications when they are built and when they are deployed. After all, each platform that software is deployed on has attributes that inevitably impact how software on the platform runs.

    As software continues to become more complex in the years ahead, challenges associated with debugging applications will only continue to grow. In the age of microservices, the issue that software engineers are trying to troubleshoot might not have anything to do with the code they wrote; rather, the issue emanates from a service they invoked via an application programming interface (API). Whatever the source of the problem, it’s apparent to all a lot of time and money is being wasted on debugging software that could be put to far better use.

  • Survey Sees Increased Agile Adoption During COVID-19

    Survey Sees Increased Agile Adoption During COVID-19

    A report published by Digital.ai, the parent company of CollabNet VersionOne, finds 43% of organizations have increased their reliance on agile application development methodologies in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with 15% saying it has increased significantly in the last 90 days.

    The report also notes 33% of respondents say they have increased or expanded Agile adoption in the last 90 days to help manage distributed teams, while 55% said their company plans to increase the use of agile in the next 12 to 14 months.

    Based on a pair of surveys conducted prior to and after the pandemic started, the 14th annual “State of Agile” report also finds 60% of respondents credit agile methodologies with having helped increase speed to market, while 58% say it has improved team productivity. Another 41% say they are also better able to manage distributed teams.

    Mike O’Rourke, chief research and development officer for Digital.ai, said there is a clear correlation between the ability to manage distributed application development teams and successfully navigating the pandemic now that most application development and deployment teams are working from home.

    Many of those teams are also seeing application development deadlines being moved up as organizations prioritize digital business transformation initiatives that now are core to any business continuity strategy.

    That shift is also accelerating a shift toward focusing more on business metrics for measuring success as defined by, for example, the Scaled Application Framework (SAFe), said O’Rourke, noting as a result, there’s also a lot more focus on value stream management across the enterprise as business and IT teams work closely together. The survey finds just over half of the respondents report their organization has either already implemented value stream management (VSM) or are planning to do so.

    The survey also finds more focus on risk and compliance, with the number of respondents identifying and measuring technical risk prior to deployment increasing 54%, while the importance of automated audit compliance and governance across control points increased 10% year over year.

    Perhaps most surprising, the survey finds reducing project cost is cited as an important reason for adopting agile by only 26% of the respondents, a 41% drop from the previous year. The number of organizations focused on release planning decreased by 11%; however, organizations focusing on product road mapping increased 9% over the previous year. The survey also finds slightly more respondents are using automated acceptance tools (3%). Another 12% said they plan to adopt agile project management tools in the future.

    It’s not clear whether increased focus on application development might result in bottlenecks when it’s time to deploy those applications. Organizations that have already embraced best DevOps practices alongside agile development methodologies will naturally be in a better position to deploy applications. At the same time, increased focus on digital business transformation is likely to accelerate the adoption of both agile development methodologies and best DevOps practices across the enterprise.

    In fact, it’s arguable that organizations that are not able to build and deploy applications adroitly may soon find they are unable to compete at a time when software development has become critical to their survival.

  • CTO.ai Launches SlackOps Tool for DevOps

    CTO.ai Launches SlackOps Tool for DevOps

    CTO.ai has launched SlackOps, a platform for managing DevOps workflows in real-time via the Slack communications and collaboration service.

    Company CEO Kyle Campbell said many DevOps teams are embracing Slack to share updates with one another. SlackOps takes that preference for DevOps a step further to enable complex DevOps processes, also known as ChatOps, to be launched from the Slack command line.

    That approach allows any member of the DevOps team to write a workflow once and securely share it regardless of what language is employed, added Campbell.

    SlackOps also provides access to a public registry that CTO.ai already makes available for sharing developer shortcuts within a specific community.

    Beyond streamlining communications processes across DevOps teams, Campbell said DevOps teams will be able to surface additional insights into workflows using DevOps research and assessment metrics to make them more efficient. SlackOps also makes it easier to onboard new members of a DevOps team, he noted.

    SlackOps is deployed as a container on the Slack platform and can be downloaded via the Slack marketplace in a couple of minutes.

    The goal is to enable organizations to embrace a lean approach to DevOps that enables them to quickly adjust processes as required, said Campbell. Rather than having to commit to a single tool or platform, developers should be able to advance the overall state of DevOps within their organizations without having to be concerned whether a new tool or platform will disrupt communications across the DevOps team.

    It’s too early to say to what degree Slack might emerge as a control plane for managing DevOps processes. It is, however, becoming more popular as a way to communicate across members who employ a broad range of tools. Rather than attempting to force DevOps teams to standardize on a single set of tools and platforms, Slack provides a more flexible means of communicating in real-time that is delivered as a cloud service.

    Of course, there are now plenty of alternatives to Slack. It will be up to each DevOps team to decide which communications medium best suits them. However, embedding a DevOps workflow application within a communications platform could serve to make Slack a more compelling option for many DevOps teams. Regardless of the communications medium, DevOps teams should expect to be more continuously engaged with one another. That may prove to be a critical requirement with most members of a DevOps team working from home for the foreseeable future in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    As workflows built around asynchronous email messages increasingly are giving way to real-time communications, the challenge many DevOps teams face is finding a way to embrace that higher level of interactivity without members of the DevOps team becoming overwhelmed by the volume of messages being shared. Making the transition to DevOps was enough of a cultural challenge for many organizations. Inundating DevOps teams with real-time messages, not all of which may be pertinent to a DevOps workflow, needs to be tempered by tools that help identify the DevOps signal within all the noise.

  • CloudBees Extends SDM Service Reach

    CloudBees Extends SDM Service Reach

    CloudBees has extended the integrations embedded within its software delivery management (SDM) platform to add support for additional services provided by Google.

    Moritz Plassnig, senior vice president cloud and general manager for SDM at CloudBees, said these integrations with Google Cloud Build and Tekton pipelines are being provided as part of a long-standing alliance between the two companies to advance the adoption of best DevOps practices. The CloudBees SDM service runs on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

    As part of that effort, CloudBees has been making investments in an SDM platform that enables DevOps teams to pull metrics from any tool or platform. That data is then fed into an analytics cloud service through which CloudBees surfaces insights that identify, for example, how delays to a project might impact overall revenue goals.

    Interest in software delivery analytics has risen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as organizations accelerate the building and deploying of digital business applications, said Plassnig. With employees and customers alike working from home to combat the pandemic, organizations are investing more in creating applications that provide digital alternatives to engaging end users, he noted, adding delays to any of those projects are likely to have a much bigger impact on business continuity strategies today than they did just a few short months ago.

    The CloudBees SDM service provides DevOps teams and business managers alike a real-time view of all product and feature development occurring across the organization, as well as a policy engine to trigger actions to better optimize the software delivery process. Organizations can also model and visualize the software delivery process while measuring overall DevOps performance.

    Rather than requiring organizations to standardize on a single platform to achieve that goal, Plassnig said CloudBees is leveraging application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate metrics across a broad range of DevOps tools. That approach, he said, makes it possible to meet organizations wherever they are in terms of DevOps maturity.

    Support for Tekton pipelines is significant, Plassnig noted, because it’s expected that most continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms in the future will be built using Tekton pipelines, which provide an open source framework for building platforms that are designed to be deployed on Kubernetes clusters. Jenkins X, originally developed by CloudBees, is one of the first CI/CD platforms to support Tekton pipelines, which were originally developed by Google. Jenkins X and Tekton pipelines are now being advanced under the auspices of the Continuous Delivery Foundation, an arm of the Linux Foundation.

    As more CI/CD platforms embrace Tekton, the platforms themselves will become less of a black box from an analytics perspective, noted Plassnig.

    In the meantime, CloudBees also expects Google to continue to gain momentum as a cloud service provider, he said. While Google trails Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft in terms of overall market share by a wide margin, Plassnig noted that with the arrival of Anthos, a cloud operating system capable of being deployed on multiple cloud and on-premises IT environments, it’s only a matter of time before services such as Google Cloud Build are employed more widely.

    Whatever the platform used, the one thing for certain is the rate at which software is being generated and deployed on various platforms will be watched much more closely.

  • Rubrik Looks to Meld Data Management and DevOps

    Rubrik Looks to Meld Data Management and DevOps

    During its FORWARD Digital Summit event last week, Rubrik made a case for the melding of DevOps and data management.

    The company announced that its Polaris Data Management Platform, delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, has added the ability to protect workloads running on virtual machines on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Rubrik already provides support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure clouds.

    In addition, Rubrik announced it has extended its AWS data protection support to include the Amazon Relational Database Service along with support for the OneDrive cloud service from Microsoft. Rubrik already provides support for Microsoft Office 365.

    While most of the revenue Rubrik generates comes from data protection delivered as a service, president Dan Rogers said Rubrik is really a provider of a data management platform. With more applications heading into the cloud, it’s now only a matter of time before DevOps teams start to leverage the Rubrik application programming interface (API) to make the Polaris platform a vehicle for accessing large amounts of data, he said, noting Polaris is built from the ground up using GraphQL APIs and metadata that make it programmatically accessible.

    Of course, Polaris today is accessed most often by IT operations teams via a graphical user interface (GUI). That approach allows Polaris to bridge legacy approaches to data management alongside emerging DevOps environments. It’s not clear to what degree DevOps teams are programmatically invoking platforms such as Polaris, but as applications are developed and deployed at faster rates DevOps teams have a vested interest in a platform that makes it easier to access the data those applications require.

    Rogers also noted data protection platforms play a major role in application development and testing environments. Developers need to be able to recover the previous iteration of the application following a crash.

    IT teams are also making extensive use of the backup capabilities provided by a data protection platform to migrate data from on-premises IT environments into the cloud.

    Rubrik is not the only provider of a data management platform being delivered via a set of SaaS applications. The company has been making a case to initially replace on-premises data protection offerings with a cloud approach that in addition to data protection software makes data management tools available to address tasks such as data governance and compliance as well as metadata management.

    It’s not clear to what degree data management and protection will be automated. However, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rogers noted more organizations will be accelerating the rate at which IT management platforms of all types are accessed as a cloud service. With many IT operations teams now working from home for what may be an extended time period, organizations will be migrating to platforms that lend themselves more easily to being remotely accessed, he said. In fact, it’s already apparent that in some cases IT teams—like it or not—may never be returning to an office again.

  • Low-Code and RPA With Appian CTO Michael Beckley

    Low-Code and RPA With Appian CTO Michael Beckley

    On the eve of the first virtual Appian World, we caught up with Appian founder and CTO Michael Beckley. Michael spoke to us about low-code and RPA as well as AI and robotics, all being leveraged to help organizations during the COVID-19 crisis.

    Obviously, given the current situation, developing applications quickly with a minimum of coding while harnessing automation and AI would be a big premium. This is a situation that seems perfect for Appian.

    In fact, the whole low-code and RPA model seems tailor-made for a COVID-like situation. Michael shares with us several instances of healthcare and governmental agencies using Appian and RPA to deliver massively scalable applications to measure and gather data around COVID-19.

    Low-code and RPA are not just COVID-19 trends, either. Michael and I discussed why the new normal will reward organizations that use RPA and low-code, as well as harnessing AI and robotics to build apps that can scale massively quickly with minimal coding.

    If Michael is correct, Appian is in an enviable position to deliver a robust, proven platform that will allow organizations to harness the power of low-code and RPA.

    My discussion with Michael is below. While Appian World virtual kicks off today, Michael actually delivers the keynote for the second day of Appian World on Wednesday. If you get a moment, don’t miss Michael’s talk. He has some great insight into how low-code and RPA can be a benefit during the COVID-19 crisis.

    While you’re at it, I highly recommend attending as much of Appian World that you can. I had the pleasure of attending one in Miami two years ago and was very much looking forward to this year’s event in Ft. Lauderdale, before it was converted to a virtual event. Appian’s hackathon is usually a great event to check out at Appian World as well.

  • DevOps Deeper Dive: Teams Adjust to New WFH Normal

    DevOps Deeper Dive: Teams Adjust to New WFH Normal

    In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic the level of software development activity has remained relatively constant, but developers—who, like everyone else—are now largely working from home, are putting in more hours. Organizations are now grappling with whether working remotely on software development projects now represents the “new normal.”

    A report published this week by GitHub shows that while there was a slight dip in activity in various regions of the world as the pandemic spread, activity on the public GitHub repository quickly recovered. Whether developers are spending more time working on projects is difficult to conclude given all the potential distractions at home, but according to the GitHub report, the amount of time spent on the platform per developer has increased. This could be due to various factors including the fact that developers are not commuting to work or are managing multiple tasks—some of which are directly related to work—across an extended working day. Others simply may be taking more breaks between activities.

    Despite working in isolation, it would appear developers are remaining productive, said Kelly Stirman, vice president of product strategy and marketing for GitHub. “More time to code increases productivity.”

    Providers of other DevOps platforms have observed similar increases in activity during the pandemic. Moritz Plassnig, senior vice president and general manager for software delivery management and software delivery automation cloud at CloudBees, said many organizations have been launching custom application development projects to drive digital business transformation initiatives. Now those projects are becoming core to the organization’s business continuity strategy.

    “The current situation has only accelerated that trend,” said Plassnig.

    The biggest challenge in managing a highly distributed workforce is ensuring the right code is being worked on at the right time, said Fred Simon, chief data scientist of JFrog. “Everyone needs feedback.”

    To provide that feedback, managers have employed collaboration tools such as Zoom and, when necessary, shifted work to DevOps platforms made available as a cloud service, added Simon.

    At the same time, the level of communications tooling baked into a DevOps platform matters more than ever, said Emrah Samdan, vice president of product at Thundra, a provider of a platform for securing and observing cloud-native microservices. Developers can collaborate with each other much more effectively using asynchronous communications tools to, for example, share code.

    “A lot of productivity is being lost setting up Zoom calls,” said Samdan.

    The issue now is whether working on software development projects remotely represents the new normal. A recent survey of chief financial officers published by PwC finds that nearly half of the respondents (49%) plan to make remote work a permanent option for roles within their organizations that allow for it.

    How employees will respond to that change will vary. According to results from a recent survey of workers conducted by GitLab, 52% of employees say they are more productive working remotely, while 48% are more efficient. Of course, those results also suggest half of employees don’t share that same level of appreciation for working from home.

    It’s worth noting that many software development teams were already heading in the direction of working remotely more often prior to the pandemic, said Brendan O’Leary, senior developer evangelist at GitLab. In fact, he noted, resources such as the GitLab Remote Playbook have been downloaded more frequently over the last few months.

    “I think it is a time that will see a real separation of bosses and leaders,” O’Leary said, noting leaders will go beyond simply tracking metrics to enable organizations to continue to launch innovative software development projects.

    Obviously, DevOps teams that were working in a distributed fashion prior to the pandemic have a distinct advantage over those that have worked primarily in the same central location. However, given all the current uncertainties organizations now face, it’s probable every member of a DevOps team going forward is going to be working from home a lot more often.

  • CloudBees Brings Feature Flagging to On-Prem Environs

    CloudBees Brings Feature Flagging to On-Prem Environs

    CloudBees this week announced an update to CloudBees Feature Flags that now makes it possible to deploy this capability in on-premises IT environments.

    Moritz Plassnig, senior vice president and general manager for software delivery management and software delivery automation cloud at CloudBees, said CloudBees Feature Flags previously was available only as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application following the company’s acquisition of Rollout last year.

    However, there are still many organizations in highly regulated industries that are prohibited from developing applications in the cloud. The latest version now allows those organizations to employ CloudBees Feature Flags to roll out new features in a more controlled way, he said.

    Cloud computing, of course, has been around for more than a decade. The adoption of cloud computing has increased dramatically in recent years; however, the bulk of applications are still deployed in on-premises IT environments. CloudBees makes on-premises editions of its platforms available alongside cloud services to meet IT teams wherever they are on the application development spectrum, said Plassnig.

    While feature flagging has been around for some time most enterprise IT organizations are just now starting to employ it. As organizations roll out new capabilities, feature flagging enables DevOps teams to make a new capability available to only a small segment of application users. Assuming all goes well, the DevOps teams can then go ahead make that capability available to all users with greater confidence. Feature flagging makes deploying updates to applications less scary for all concerned by reducing the inherent risks, Plassnig noted.

    Feature flagging is used mainly within the context of application development. However, Plassnig said eventually this capability will be deployed more widely in production environments. Organizations, for example, might employ feature flagging to make specific capabilities available to specific classes of users.

    Of course, CloudBees is not the only provider of a DevOps platform to embrace feature flagging. However, as the provider of an enterprise edition of one of the most widely employed continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms, CloudBees is betting it’s in a better position to make feature flagging a standard capability within any software development life cycle (SDLC). Plassnig said DevOps teams should also expect to see CloudBees tighten the integration between CloudBees Feature Flags and CloudBees Flow, a tool for orchestrating releases and automating application deployments.

    With the rise of microservices, it’s become easier for DevOps teams to isolate functions within applications. The challenge is that managing all those modules of code often requires DevOps teams to implement more complex workflow processes. Advances in automation will simplify those processes; nevertheless, DevOps teams still have to define the workflow processes that will be automated.

    In the meantime, it’s only a matter of time before DevOps teams come to view feature flagging as a standard requirement. It will be interesting to see to what degree feature flagging might one day be incorporated into the core open source CI/CD platform itself.

  • Sacrificing Security for Speed: 5 Mistakes Businesses Make in Application Development

    Sacrificing Security for Speed: 5 Mistakes Businesses Make in Application Development

    Earlier this year, the Democratic party in Iowa announced its plans to use a smartphone app to calculate and transmit their caucus results. Using technology to improve the speed of governance, one would think, “What could possibly go wrong? A lot, apparently. The app’s failure on results day was attributed to reporting and coding issues.

    While security was the matter of concern from the day of its announcement, the inevitable happened. Data and security breaches happen almost every minute. University of Maryland researchers find cyberattacks every 39 seconds. The last decade has seen many data breaches, putting personal information of billions of users in the hands of dubious entities. Every enterprise, from Yahoo to Facebook and Target to Home Depot, has been under attack—and this is likely to continue. Research has found that cybersecurity breaches will result in over 146 billion records stolen by 2023.

    Poor security is putting enterprises, governments and citizens at risk every day. Yet, in a hurry to leverage technology, companies bring unsecured applications to market all the time. In essence, they sacrifice security for speed. Adding to this, today’s modern web and mobile applications are built with latest and greatest technology stacks and frameworks, heavily reliant on client side functionality, and integration to multiclouds and third party systems using a myriad of APIs. Also teams are more diverse and work collaboratively using remote workforces. 

    These trends increase the security challenges the application development teams need to be aware of, and leverage platforms that provide built-in controls and protection against these to avoid security breaches and attacks. 

    While prioritizing speed over security in application development take into consideration the following mistakes that you need to avoid and address.

    Not Looking at Data Security Holistically 

    Data tends to be the most important and valuable aspect of modern web applications. Poor application design and architecture leads to data and security breaches. Application development teams generally assume that by providing the right authentication and authorization measures to the application, data will be protected. This is a misconception. Right measures to provide data security involve focussing on data integrity, fine grained data access and encrypting data while in rest as well as in motion. In addition, data security needs to be looked at holistically from the time the request is made to the time response is sent back across all layers of the application runtime.

    Not Considering Security Across the Application Development Lifecycle 

    Today’s modern web applications are highly sophisticated and built with a big focus on simplistic user experience combined with high scalability. This combination can be challenging for application development teams from a security perspective. Most development teams focus only on silos when securing the application (only client, server or integration layer). Teams should focus on end-to-end full stack security when developing applications. Also application teams should enforce security best practices incorporated by default as part of the collaborative development process.

    Not Focusing on API Security

    Most of the modern web applications use APIs from systems and services which include internal enterprise systems, cloud SaaS APIs, partner APIs and third party product APIs. Today, almost all web applications tend to expose their own functionality to the external environment as a core set of APIs. What’s more, nearly 100% of web applications today tend to expose its own functionality as a core set of APIs to the external world. Teams need to make sure they are using external APIs with proper security guidelines and protocols as well as exposing their own APIs with multiple choices of protecting them. API access needs to be protected with both coarse grained as well as fine grained measures.

    Not Providing Strong Authorization and Authentication Methods

    Authenticating your application and authorizing what users can access is an important part of application security. Without this, you are leaving your attack surface wide open. Your application needs to incorporate stringent and strong measures for authentication to prevent unauthorized access. This includes multi-factor authentication, passwordless authentication, single sign on and if using passwords very strong password policies. It must also offer fine grained role-based access control preventing access of sensitive and confidential data to non-privileged users. Moving to a market with ambiguous weak authentication, lack of fine grained control, improper session control and insufficient logging might not seem like a probable risk until you’re attacked.

    Not Incorporating Vulnerability Testing Throughout the Development Lifecycle

    Security threats are evolving faster than anyone can keep track of. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), a community of application developers and security professionals, identifies the top 10 security risks each application team must mitigate. This includes risks across injection, data exposure, misconfiguration, security deserialization and so on. Development teams should incorporate vulnerability assessment as a continuous process and not leave it at the end of the deployment cycle.

    Automating Security with Development Platforms

    Integrating security into your application development process does not have to slow you down. By utilizing key technologies such as a low-code platform, you can accelerate development and enable security procedures at the same time.

    While promising accelerated development, what an ideal low-code application development platform offers is a visual development environment and code-customization with two-way workplace sync with IDEs. It also enables autogeneration of code, ensures extensibility and reuse with prefabs, and allows for full integration with CI/CD pipelines. 

    One of the important features of a low-code platform is built-in security, one that ensures automation of the development of application-level security features. A perfect platform provides a configuration for prevention of security vulnerabilities such as XSS and CSRF and ensures in-built encryption, robust authentication and authorization systems, along with enterprise-grade auditability and traceability.

    While speed may be the name of the game, rolling out your applications without considering security would have little positive impact if they fail to function and are not secure. One of the best ways to integrate security across your application development lifecycle is to leverage the benefits of low-code platforms that are designed for professional development, those that have built-in, application-level security features. While your application development plans may be time-critical, security cannot be an afterthought, because sacrificing security for speed may make it longer for you to mitigate the risks than achieve your application development goals.