Empirical evaluation of the efficiency and feasibility of security requirements specification techniques in agile processes

• Grant number: 24/19047-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: December 01, 2024
• End date: November 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computer Systems
• Principal Investigator: Lina María Garcés Rodríguez
• Grantee: Lucas Pereira Franco de Almeida
• Host Institution: Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação (ICMC). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In the current scenario, where connectivity and digitalization permeate a large part of society, software security has become a crucial concern for both organizations and individuals. This hyper-connected environment fosters an increase in cybercrimes, which frequently exploit implementation vulnerabilities-rather than infrastructure failures-putting sensitive data and critical operations at risk. However, despite being a fundamental practice for preventing security breaches, agile methodologies often neglect the elicitation of security requirements during the early stages of development. This project addresses this gap by proposing an empirical evaluation of the effectiveness and feasibility of techniques for specifying these requirements in agile processes. The methodology involves a systematic review of existing literature and the conduction of an empirical experiment to evaluate different strategies for specifying security requirements in agile development contexts, both following established policies and methods in the field of Software Engineering throughout the study. The results are expected to provide concrete evidence of the effectiveness and feasibility of these techniques, offering valuable insights to the software industry on how to efficiently integrate security requirements into agile environments and contributing to the advancement of security in agile methodologies.