Executive Summary

The Department of Defense’s enterprise-wide adoption of DevSecOps represents a fundamental shift in how defense systems are developed, secured, and delivered. For DoD contractors, this transformation presents a strategic opportunity to better serve their customers through enhanced software delivery capabilities. By embracing DevSecOps practices, contractors can deliver higher-quality software faster, respond more rapidly to changing mission needs, and better support the DoD’s modernization objectives.

This implementation guide whitepaper provides DoD contractors with a practical roadmap for DevSecOps adoption, covering both customer-facing delivery capabilities and internal modernization needs. Drawing from real-world implementations across the defense industrial base, we outline proven strategies for building robust software delivery pipelines that integrate security throughout the development lifecycle while maintaining the high standards required in defense systems.

Whether supporting classified program requirements or modernizing internal development practices, contractors will find actionable insights for building resilient, secure, and efficient software delivery pipelines. This guide particularly focuses on harmonizing DevSecOps practices with existing federal compliance frameworks, including RMF, CMMC, and NIST guidance.

Defining DevSecOps

DevSecOps stands for Development, Security, and Operations. It’s a framework for software engineering that integrates security into all facets of the engineering workflow, and breaks down silos between teams. More than just a set of tools or practices, DevSecOps represents a cultural and technical transformation in how organizations approach software delivery.

In traditional software development, teams often work in isolation. Developers write code and “throw it over the wall” to security teams for review, who then pass it to operations teams for deployment. This sequential approach leads to several problems:

DevSecOps addresses these challenges by:

  1. Automating security checks and compliance validation throughout the development pipeline
  2. Establishing consistent environments across development, testing, and production
  3. Implementing continuous integration and deployment practices that catch issues early
  4. Creating shared responsibility for software quality and security across all teams
  5. Enabling small, rapid, reliable updates to production systems

For DoD contractors, DevSecOps is particularly valuable because it aligns software delivery practices with modern defense requirements. As military systems become increasingly software-dependent, the ability to rapidly deliver secure, reliable updates becomes mission-critical. DevSecOps provides the framework to meet these demands while maintaining the high standards required for defense systems.

Know Where You Stand

The first step in the shift towards DevSecOps is a comprehensive accounting of your current practices and pain points. Before introducing new tools or processes, organizations need a clear understanding of their current software delivery lifecycle, team structure, and operational challenges.

Key Areas to Assess:

Development Workflow

Security Integration

Operational Readiness

Team Structure and Culture

This assessment serves multiple purposes. It identifies immediate opportunities for improvement (“quick wins”), and establishes a baseline that you can measure progress against. It also gives insights into which DevSecOps practices should be prioritized for implementation, and reveals cultural and organizational barriers that need to be addressed before continuing.

Conducting the Assessment

A thorough DevSecOps assessment requires input from all stakeholders and should combine both quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback. Begin by collecting concrete metrics about your software delivery process, including:

These metrics provide objective data about your current state and help identify bottlenecks. Many of these metrics can be automatically extracted from your existing tools like Git, CI/CD platforms, and issue trackers, if you use these systems.

Next, schedule focused sessions with representatives from each team involved in software delivery. Developers can share their daily workflow challenges, while security teams can identify review bottlenecks and common findings. Operations staff provide crucial insight into deployment and maintenance issues. Include project managers to understand coordination challenges, and whenever possible, gather feedback from end users or customer representatives about delivery speed and quality.

Take inventory of your current technology stack, noting which tools are working well and which are causing friction. This includes everything from source control and build tools to security scanners and monitoring solutions. Understanding your current toolchain helps identify gaps and opportunities for automation.

Finally, review your regulatory and contractual obligations. While compliance shouldn’t drive your DevSecOps transformation, understanding these requirements helps ensure your improved processes will meet necessary standards. This includes security controls, customer-specific requirements, and documentation needs.

Digesting Your Findings

You now have a pile of data, interviews, feedback, and more. Now, it’s time to focus on identifying patterns and key opportunities that will drive meaningful change in your software delivery capabilities.

Look for common themes in stakeholder feedback. If multiple teams mention deployment reliability as a concern, or if security reviews consistently create bottlenecks, these areas deserve priority attention. Pay particular attention when technical metrics support qualitative feedback–for example, if developers complain about slow feedback cycles and your metrics show long pull request review times.

Consider the impact versus effort of potential improvements. Some pain points might have simple technical solutions, like automating a manual build step or adding automated security scans to pull requests. Others might require deeper organizational changes, like restructuring teams or establishing new collaboration patterns. While organizational changes often yield greater long-term benefits, starting with concrete technical improvements can build momentum and demonstrate value quickly.

Group your findings into three categories: immediate opportunities, structural challenges, and long-term aspirations. Immediate opportunities are issues you can address with your current tools and team structure. Structural challenges require more significant changes to processes or organization. Long-term aspirations represent your ideal state and help guide strategic planning.

Remember that your assessment findings should inform rather than dictate your transformation strategy. The goal isn’t to fix everything at once, but to identify where you can start making meaningful progress toward more effective software delivery.

Culture-First

DevSecOps isn’t primarily about tools or processes–it’s about changing how teams work together to deliver software. Without the right cultural foundation, even the most sophisticated automation tools will fail to deliver their promised benefits. For DoD contractors, this cultural shift is particularly crucial given the complex requirements and high stakes of defense systems. It’s also particularly hard for the same reasons.

The core of DevSecOps culture is shared responsibility for delivery outcomes. This means moving away from the notion that developers only write code, security teams only conduct reviews, and operations teams only manage production systems. Instead, every team member needs to understand and contribute to the entire software lifecycle.

This cultural transformation must be fully embraced and driven at the leadership level. Leaders must model the behavior they want to see, removing organizational barriers and rewarding collaboration over individual achievements. They need to demonstrate that learning from failures is more valuable than avoiding them entirely, and that experimentation within appropriate bounds is encouraged.

Trust is fundamental to this cultural shift. Security teams need to trust that developers will consider security implications in their design decisions. Operations teams need to trust that new deployments won’t destabilize production systems. Developers need to trust that their colleagues will provide timely, constructive feedback. Building this trust requires transparency, reliable processes, and consistent follow-through on commitments.

For many organizations, the hardest part of cultural change is moving away from a blame-focused mindset. When incidents occur–and they will–the focus should be on understanding and improving the system rather than finding individuals to hold responsible. This means conducting blameless postmortems, sharing lessons learned openly, and treating each incident as an opportunity to strengthen your processes.

Fostering Cultural Change

Start small and be patient–cultural transformation happens through consistent actions over time, not through mandates or policy documents. Begin by identifying teams or projects that are already receptive to new ways of working. Their success can demonstrate the benefits of DevSecOps practices and create organic advocates for change across your organization.

Create opportunities for cross-team collaboration in day-to-day work. Invite security engineers to architecture discussions rather than waiting for formal reviews. Include operations perspectives in sprint planning. Make code reviews a collaborative learning opportunity rather than a gate to pass through. These regular interactions build relationships and understanding across traditional team boundaries.

Establish feedback mechanisms that emphasize learning and improvement. When reviewing incidents or deployment failures, focus discussion on what the system should have prevented rather than what individuals should have done differently. Document and share these lessons openly–transparency builds trust and helps prevent similar issues across teams.

Recognize and reward behaviors that support DevSecOps culture. Highlight teams that effectively automate security checks, developers who improve deployment reliability, and operations staff who make monitoring more accessible. These examples show others what good looks like and reinforce the values you want to promote.

Invest in cross-training and skill development. Developers should understand basic security principles and operational concerns. Security teams should learn about modern development practices. Operations staff should be familiar with code management and testing approaches. This shared knowledge base makes collaboration more effective and helps teams understand each other’s perspectives.

Measuring Cultural Change

Cultural transformation can seem intangible, but there are concrete ways to measure progress. Track collaboration patterns: are teams participating in each other’s ceremonies? Are security and operations concerns being addressed earlier in development? Look at how incidents are handled: do postmortems focus on system improvements rather than individual mistakes? Monitor pull request discussions: is feedback constructive and focused on learning?

Quantitative metrics can support these qualitative observations. Measure the time security teams spend on proactive work versus reactive reviews. Track how often operations teams are consulted during design phases rather than just before deployment. Look at the distribution of commits across teams – are operations and security engineers contributing directly to codebases? Monitor the speed of incident resolution and the implementation of lessons learned.

Maintaining momentum requires constant attention and reinforcement. Regular retrospectives should examine not just what teams are doing differently, but why these changes matter. Share success stories that connect improved collaboration to better outcomes for your DoD customers. Celebrate small wins while keeping sight of larger transformation goals.

Watch for signs of cultural regression, and beat them back with a stick. When teams are under pressure, it’s easy to fall back into old patterns–siloed work, blame-focused responses to failures, treating security as an afterthought. These moments require active intervention from leadership to reinforce DevSecOps principles and provide the support teams need to maintain new ways of working.

Remember that cultural change isn’t a destination but a continuous journey. As your organization grows and evolves, you’ll need to regularly reinforce and adapt your DevSecOps culture. New team members need to be actively integrated into this culture, and existing teams need ongoing support to deepen their collaboration.

Technical Implementation

Successfully implementing DevSecOps requires thoughtful integration of tools and practices that support your cultural transformation. Rather than attempting to overhaul everything at once, focus on incremental improvements that deliver measurable value. Start with foundational capabilities and build up to more sophisticated practices as your teams gain experience. The key here is making doing the right things easy, and the wrong things hard.

Version Control Fundamentals

Everything starts with robust version control practices. All production artifacts–not just application code, but infrastructure definitions, configuration files, deployment scripts, and security policies–should be version controlled. This provides traceability, enables collaboration, and ensures reproducibility of your systems. Use branch protection rules, signed commits, and automated checks to maintain code quality and security baselines.

Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Pipelines

Build a CI/CD pipeline that automatically validates every code change. This should include compilation, unit tests, security scans, and dependency checks. The key is providing rapid feedback to developers about potential issues. Failed checks should block merges, but the process should be quick enough that it doesn’t become a bottleneck. Your pipeline should produce detailed logs and artifacts that make it easy to understand and fix failures.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Treat your infrastructure with the same rigor as application code. Use infrastructure as code tools to define your environments, ensuring consistency across development, testing, and production. This includes network configurations, security groups, and service definitions. Version control and review these definitions just like application code. Automated validation should verify that infrastructure changes meet security and compliance requirements.

Automated Security Testing

Security testing must be continuous and automated to be effective. Start by integrating Static Application Security Testing (SAST) into your CI pipeline to catch common vulnerabilities early. Add Software Composition Analysis (SCA) to identify known vulnerabilities in dependencies. As your capabilities mature, incorporate Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) and Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) to identify runtime vulnerabilities. All of these testing strategies should be implemented as part of your CI/CD pipeline.

Container security deserves special attention in DoD environments. Implement container scanning to check for known vulnerabilities, verify base image provenance, and ensure compliance with security policies. Use signed container images and maintain a secure container registry. Your pipeline should automatically update containers when new security patches become available.

Deployment Automation

Automate your deployment process to make it consistent and repeatable. Start with infrastructure provisioning, then add application deployment automation. Use deployment strategies like blue-green or canary deployments to minimize risk. Each deployment should include automated smoke tests and security validation before releasing traffic to the new version.

Zero-trust principles should guide your deployment architecture. Implement strict access controls, network segmentation, and secure service-to-service communication. Use service mesh capabilities to manage traffic, enforce security policies, and provide observability into service interactions.

Monitoring and Observability

Build comprehensive monitoring from the start. Collect metrics, logs, and traces that help understand system behavior and quickly identify issues. Implement security monitoring to detect potential threats and compliance violations. Your monitoring should support both technical and business metrics, helping teams understand the impact of changes on system performance and user experience.

Automated Compliance and Audit

In DoD environments, compliance isn’t just about passing periodic audits–it needs to be continuously verified and documented. Implement automated checks that validate compliance requirements at every stage of your pipeline. This includes checking code against security baselines, validating infrastructure configurations, and verifying deployment procedures meet required controls.

Build your compliance checks to be as specific and actionable as possible. Rather than generic security rules, implement checks that map directly to your compliance requirements like RMF controls or CMMC practices. When violations are found, provide clear guidance on what needs to be fixed and why it matters. This helps developers understand and address compliance issues without requiring constant consultation with security teams.

Audit logging must be comprehensive yet usable. Log all system changes, access attempts, and security-relevant events. Ensure logs are properly secured and maintained for required retention periods. But don’t just collect logs – build tools to analyze them effectively. Create dashboards that help teams understand compliance status and trends. Implement automated alerts for potential compliance violations.

Automate the generation of compliance documentation. Your pipelines should produce artifacts that demonstrate controls are working–test results, security scan reports, configuration validations. Structure these artifacts to support your authorization and certification processes. This doesn’t just save time during audits; it provides continuous visibility into your compliance posture.

Remember that tools like GitOps can help maintain compliance by ensuring all changes go through version control and automated validation. This creates a clear audit trail and helps prevent configuration drift that could lead to compliance violations.

Conclusion

Success with DevSecOps is a journey, not a destination. The practices and tools outlined in this guide provide a foundation for delivering better software to DoD customers, but each organization must adapt these principles to their specific context and requirements.

Start where you are–assess your current state honestly, identify achievable improvements, and build momentum through incremental success. Focus on cultural change while steadily enhancing your technical capabilities. Remember that the goal isn’t perfect processes, but better outcomes: faster delivery of high-quality software that meets mission needs.

For DoD contractors, implementing DevSecOps isn’t just about modernizing development practices. It’s about being a better partner to your customers, delivering capabilities that enhance mission effectiveness, and maintaining the high standards required for defense systems. Organizations that successfully make this transformation will be better positioned to serve their DoD customers and adapt to evolving mission requirements.

Keep your focus on value delivery and continuous improvement. Regularly reassess your practices, learn from both successes and failures, and stay current with evolving DevSecOps practices in the defense industry. The investment in DevSecOps capabilities will pay dividends in improved software quality, enhanced security, and better mission outcomes.

Ready to Start Your DevSecOps Journey?

Satine Technologies helps DoD contractors build and mature their DevSecOps capabilities. Our experienced team can help you:

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