Evaluation of Requirement Engineering Best Practices for Secure Software
Development in GSD: An ISM Analysis
Abstract
Technological advancement makes the world a global village. The immense
use of software systems has modernized human society in every aspect.
Thus, the security parameter is an important element that needs to be
considered while developing software systems. Considering the
significance of software security, it is important to consider the
security practices from the early phase of the software development life
cycle (SDLC), i.e., requirements engineering (RE). Hence, this study
aims to identify and categorize RE practices important to apply for
secure software development (SSD) in a geographically distributed
development environment. To study the RE practices concerning SSD, we
conducted a questionnaire survey with industrial experts in the global
software development (GSD) context. Furthermore, the interpretive
structure modeling (ISM) approach was applied to evaluate the
relationship between the RE security practice core categories. This
paper identifies 70 practices and classifies them into 11 fundamental
dimensions (categories) to assist GSD organizations in specifying the
requirements for SSD. The ISM results show the “Awareness of Secure
Requirement Engineering (SRE)” category has the most decisive influence
on the other ten core categories of the identified RE security
practices. With the help of empirical evidence and the ISM approach,
this work attempts to identify potential security practices and to give
a set of secure RE practices that can be used to improve the security of
the software development process.