Security From Happiness


The data is beginning to paint an interesting picture about the relationship between security and developer happiness. The 2020 DevSecOps survey from Sonatype indicates that happy developers are 3.6 times less likely to neglect security in their code. And 2.3 times more likely to set up automated security tools, and 1.3 times more likely to follow open source security policies.

In addition, developers working within a mature DevOps practice are 1.5 times more likely to enjoy their work, and 1.6 times more likely to recommend their employer to their peers. These last conclusions about the relationship between DevOps maturity and developer happiness are also supported in multiple versions of the DORA State of DevOps survey data.

Businesses actually want five things from developers, but usually only ask for one and assume the  other four take care of themselves. What they want, and ask for the most are new features. The next ask is improvements in new feature velocity. Rarely do they ask for quality, availability or security. These last three are the least understood by business leadership, so they usually aren't discusses unless there is a problem that reveals a failure in one of these areas.

Happy developers work in environments with a high degree of test and deployment automation--which includes security. Thus it is critical that development managers focus on maturing their DevOps practices. This is accomplished by increasing test, deployment and security automations and training developers in secure coding and testing practices.

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