Toward Successful Secure Software Deployment: An Empirical Study

Software deployment is the last stage of the software development life cycle (SDLC). It includes the execution of software in a customer environment. Nowadays, security has been integrated with the SDLC stages to produce secure software, improve software quality, and increase customer satisfaction. However, the software has become complex in recent execution environments, putting more pressure on securely deploying the software in these environments. This work extends our previous study published in [11], in which we have identified a list of best practices to address the secure software deployment challenges. In our previous study, we categorized secure software deployment challenges into five levels of importance; critical, high, medium, low, and very low level. In this study, we provided best practices to overcome critical, high, and medium level challenges. Initially, a traditional literature review was conducted to identify best practices to overcome the challenges of secure software deployment. After that, data was collected via a questionnaire from 10 software deployment professionals to identify best practices that can be used to address the identified challenges. The outcome of this research assists software organizations in overcoming the challenges of secure software deployment. In addition, this study guides software organizations toward the secure deployment of software products.