DevSecOps Program Playbook

DevSecOps integrates security into every stage of software delivery rather than bolting it on at the end. Security becomes a shared responsibility: developers, security engineers, and operations own it together, supported by automation that catches issues early and cheaply.

This playbook builds a DevSecOps program from a maturity baseline to operational vulnerability management, anchored in the OWASP SAMM model and the NIST Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF).

Phase-by-Phase

Baseline (3 weeks). Assess current security maturity with OWASP SAMM and set clear risk thresholds — which severities block a release versus get tracked. This policy makes later gates objective rather than ad hoc.

Shift-Left Scanning (5 weeks). Add static and dynamic application security testing (SAST/DAST) and dependency scanning to pipelines, plus pre-commit hooks so issues surface before code review. Shifting left catches vulnerabilities when they cost least to fix.

Threat Modeling and Hardening (4 weeks). Run STRIDE threat modeling on key systems and harden runtimes with secure container images and ASVS-aligned controls. Threat modeling finds design flaws that scanners miss.

Secure Pipeline and Supply Chain (4 weeks). Protect the build itself: sign artifacts with keyless signing, generate a CycloneDX software bill of materials (SBOM), and work toward SLSA provenance so consumers can verify what they run.

Operate and Respond (4 weeks). Build a vulnerability triage workflow and integrate security findings into incident response with blameless postmortems, closing the loop from detection to remediation.

Team and Roles

A security lead owns the program and risk policy. Security engineers configure scanning, threat modeling, and supply-chain controls. Developers fix findings and own the security of their code. SREs and DevOps integrate controls into pipelines and runtime. QA aligns security tests with the broader test strategy.

Risks and Mitigations

Alert fatigue from noisy scanners is countered by tuning rules, deduplicating, and enforcing only meaningful severities. Developer pushback is reduced by integrating security into existing workflows and providing clear remediation guidance, not just blocking. Supply-chain attacks are mitigated by signing, SBOMs, and SLSA provenance.

Success Criteria

Lower mean time to remediate, high scan coverage across repos, and a falling vulnerability escape rate (issues reaching production). Maturity shows when security is routine, not a release-day scramble.

Tooling

GitHub Actions or GitLab CI host the scanning gates; Vault manages secrets; Docker and Kubernetes runtimes are hardened. Align with OWASP ASVS, NIST 800-53, and ISO 27001, and version container images per the OCI image spec.