Shifting Left: Secure Systems Engineering

The Shift Left principle1 is well known in software and systems development, particularly in relation to testing. It’s the idea of performing test activities earlier in the system development life cycle - developing test cases and procedures and performing incremental testing as code is being written. Ideally, test activities start even earlier than this, designing the test cases during the system requirements development and design phases with the goal of getting better capability out the door and into operation faster. Agile, DevOps and other popular systems and software development methodologies share this objective and the practices of continuous integration, automated . . .