Literature Review of the Challenges of Developing Secure Software Using the Agile Approach

A set of challenges of developing secure software using the agile development approach and methods are reported in the literature. This paper reports about a systematic literature review to identify these challenges and evaluates the causes of each of these challenges, with respect to the agile values, the agile principles, and the security assurance practices. We identified in this study 20 challenges, which are reported in 10 publications. We found that 14 of these challenges are valid and 6 are neither caused by the agile values and principles, nor by the security assurance practices. We also found that 2 of the the valid challenges are related to the software development life-cycle, 4 are related to incremental development, 4 are related to security assurance, 2 are related to awareness and collaboration, and 2 are related to security management. These results justify the need for research to make developing secure software smooth.