Measuring the effectiveness of any security activity is widely discussed - security leaders debate the topic with a religious fervor rivaling that of any other hot button issue. Virtually every organization has some sort of application security training effort, but data on training effectiveness remains scarce. Last year our research team delivered the first-ever survey that captured developer awareness of secure coding concepts and the impact of formal application security training on a developer's ability to write secure code. We learned that most software developer were aware of certain application security concepts, yet when asked how to write more secure code, they faired poorly.
This year's 600-developer survey provides more quantitative data on what software developers understand about application security, both concepts and practices. It dives most deeply into awareness of defensive coding practices, which most developers largely did not grasp in the 2013 survey. It also is separates respondents by roles, so we can better understand how architects, developers, and QA staff grasp key application security concepts and put them to work. It better captures how software developers learn in general, so one can tailor any security training effort to how software developers, in practice, actually learn. This information will provide data to application security managers responsible for corporate security training that should allow them them to make more fact-based decisions about security training.