What is the most effective way to ensure software design is secure and reliable?

For me, software engineering is an artistic expression. The pallet from which I paint is represented by the core tenants of software design: maintainability, reliability, scalability, security, useability, ingenuity, and cost. My goal with every stroke is the same: elegance. I define elegance as making the complex, simple. I draw inspiration from my surroundings, my colleagues, and various other facets of life. My primary focus as a Software Engineer is not on the code. Instead, I focus primarily on those things that have real value: the relationships I have with my team and the relationships I have with our customers. My native language is not a computer language, but the language of our domain. Strive for exceptionalism.

Crucial pillars of software engineering! ????? Embracing modularity for reusability, abstraction to focus on the essentials, and encapsulation to guard the integrity. Balancing coupling for interdependence and cohesion for consistency shapes robust systems. Let's code not just for today but for scalable, maintainable futures! ???? #SoftwareEngineering #CodingPrinciples #TechInnovation

While Modularity, Abstraction, Encapsulation, Coupling, and Cohesion are important, they are 'aspects' of software engineering as they are each a sliding scale. As for principles, especially in object-oriented programming, the SOLID design principles are paramount. SOLID is the acronym for five key design principles: Single responsibility, Open-closed, Liskov substitution, Interface segregation, and Dependency inversion. The SOLID design principles at the code level help make object-oriented designs more understandable, flexible, and maintainable, and lead to and support further abstract principles such as hexagonal architecture, and layered or microservice architecture principles, et al.

To learn software engineering principles and practices, learn from those who have been successful doing it. There is a reason certain companies have big market share. You don't have to do everything they do, but should be able to apply it to your context. Read, watch, listen, attend user groups, ask friends and recruiters. See how they have been successful, and the principles begin to emerge. Learn the fallacies, then stop doing those things. Almost as importantly, don't try to make every a custom solution. Build versus buy is a very real thing, so know what your business is good at, and focus the build there. Buy everything else that is not part of your primary value stream.

and i think good analysis results make design easier, determining the right data structure. So that we can simplify something complex.

Incorporating Security by Design and having security embedded into SDLC as a core architecture tenet helps the software to be secure. Moreover, having all the dependencies up-to-date or applying patches (automatically or semi-automated way) ensures that no vulnerabilities creep in at any phase.

Starting with the design and development of the software solution, already mentioned but really important for me to emphasize -> testing infrastructure. I think creating software using TDD and a CI/CD with automated testing (unit, system, integration) should prevent many security (and non-security) problems. The code will be simpler and more readable and I am convinced that reducing complexity surely security will be increased.

Also a major point here is using a separate authentication and authorization system to handle the security and separate the concerns between business functions and security requirements

On one of my engagements, we ensured each refined story had addressed security concerns. Stories involving controller endpoints had requirements around input validation. We scrutinized the shape of the data in both requests and responses by categorizing its risk of exposure. PII had the highest risk, so we asked the question "is it necessary to place this data on the wire?" This eventually formed into a data governance/security policy we followed on the team.

Security changes faster than developer tools these days. But there are standards that are long-lived. For authentication and authorization, learn those things and use them wisely; don't assume the threat actors will not find you, but also keep things practical because the business needs to make a profit. Stay in the know for vulnerabilities in tools that you use. For custom code and products developed in-house, get a good static analysis tool and integrate it into your build pipeline; weekly scans of everything are ideal. If you can integrate dynamic analysis, even better. Use that in your code deployment pipelines, or just scheduled it to run on the weekends, and publish reports for review Monday morning.

Utilizing appropriate Architecture fitness functions and automated quality gates ensures that any deviations are flagged/caught in early. This in turn also ensures the cost of fixing or correcting them to least.

I agree with this, and agree with the other contributors perspectives on architecture and operations, however this also goes all the way back to following sde principles. The whole foundation of the SOLID design principles is seeking to reduce the frequency and severity of software failures, errors, and bugs that can affect the functionality, usability, and performance of the software by producing software that is easy to understand, maintain, test, and extend. With SOLID code as the foundation, then the same aspects are applied to systems design following systems design principles and the architectural patterns selected to match the requirements.

A few things I've found helpful... 1. Writing modular / functional code that leverages dependency injection has allowed me to better mock and unit test that code. 2. Understanding connection pooling, transactions, and isolation levels can help avoid deadlocks and connection timeouts to the database. 3. I follow the KISS principal. I try to keep my code well organized, clean, and simple. I do not over-engineer. 4. I try to leverage existing high-quality frameworks and libraries instead of rolling my own implementation. 5. The code, and design, should ideally be intuitive and extensible. I achieve this not only by how I write the code, but how I document it and the overall design. 6. When possible, invest in full E2E UI Automation.

The simpler way to prove that software built for scale with acceptable performance is testing with Large Data Volume. Both of Unit testing, Code Coverage, Code quality, and pattern check are what the developer has to do. But, sometime, we spend intention to test with large amount of data because we only focus on the functionality. To ensure that the code was written is a good pattern which able to support large data volume, is testing with Large Data for example same simple sql query may has a big gap of time response when apply with small data and large volume of data. This need to keep in mind when design a software.

Robust monitoring and analytics ensure software health and reliability. These tools flag issues early and provide insights into performance. To enable troubleshooting and proactive optimization of the software.

Software designers may look at what is done in regulated industries such as medical devices and commercial aviation. There is a lot of good guidance available in terms of processes, methods and tooling.

Consider all users to be hostile and expect the worst. I mean that strictly from the perspective of sanitizing user input and hardening security. Don’t give your users any opportunities to use your software in harmful or unintended ways.

Careful Thinking Chaos Testing. Canary Testing. Measuring twice, cutting once. Constant small iterative releases. Careful Thinking.

There are several things I would recommend: - Take a "trust nothing" approach when designing and building systems. - Assume all actors (users) are bad actors. - Test often and include canary, chaos, penetration, and stress testing. - Don't rely only on the testing required by internal policies or standards. Rather, keep an accountability mindset and test until you've met what's required and until you are satisfied.