CAREER: Test-Driven Development of Secure and Reliable Software Applications

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ABSTRACT0346903Laurie WilliamsNorth Carolina State UniversityCAREER: The Test-Driven Development of Secure and Reliable Software ApplicationsOur nation's critical infrastructure demands that our current and future IT professionals have the knowledge, tools, and techniques to produce reliable and trustworthy software. The objective of this research is to extend, validate, and disseminate a software development practice to aid in the prevention of computer-related disasters. The practice is based upon test-driven development (TDD), a software development technique with tight verification and validation feedback loops. The proposed work extends the TDD practice and provides a supportive open-source tool for explicitly situating security as a primary attribute considered in these tight feedback loops. Additionally, the research examines the composition of TDD and pair programming/pair testing as a security- and reliability-enhancing tuple of development practices. The study will also examine the potential of pair programming/pair testing for improving the success/retention of socially-oriented women, men, and minorities in the IT workforce. The intellectual merits of this proposal include an enhanced TDD-based software development practice to mitigate security concerns and a catalog of security testing patterns disseminated via the Internet. The broad impacts of the proposal include an interuniversity student competition to build excitement about developing secure and reliable software applications and a revised undergraduate software engineering textbook integrating security and reliability topics.