Securing Software Development: A Holistic Exploration of Security Awareness in Software Development Teams

Abstract

Security awareness is crucial at every stage of the software development life cycle. Studies emphasize the importance of addressing security requirements (SR) early in the requirement engineering phase to effectively mitigate security issues. However, the software development team (SDT) currently lacks sufficient awareness regarding the security requirements assurance (SRA) for mitigating security issues in secure software development. The objective of this study is to assess the (SDT) security knowledge in early software development. A survey was distributed, questions were based on (SR) within the context of security requirement engineering (SRE). A total of 58 responded to the survey. The results indicate that the (SDT) demonstrates a satisfactory level of knowledge regarding security (KOS), security requirements elicitation and analysis (SREA), and approaches within the domain of SRE. However, the results pertaining to security requirement assurance (SRA) were found unsatisfactory. Descriptive statistics were employed to analyse the mean scores of KOS=3.79, SRE=3.61, SREA=3.67, and SRA=2.71. SRE presented the strong Pearson correlation with SREA=.596**. Also, regression coefficient produces positive outcome with (SRA) and (SREA). Though, software development teams need to collaborate with the researcher to enhance the awareness about security requirement assurance during the secure development process.