Software security is a concern that needs to be considered by everyone involved in software development. The goal of this study is to investigate how security is implemented in practice. This study extends our recent publication at the top-tier International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2025, preprint publicly available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11546). We are a team of researchers from Ruhr University Bochum (Chair of Software Engineering and the cluster of excellence CASA), which, together with the Max Planck Institute in Bochum, is Europe’s largest security research center, and Chalmers|University of Gothenburg. In this survey, we will ask about general characteristics of your software engineering process and then dive into practices for developing security ‘features,’ which are functionalities of software systems that aim to protect assets, or mitigate attacks.

This survey will only take 15 minutes. Thank you for participating in our survey.

If you have any questions, please contact us:

Kevin Hermann (kevin.hermann@rub.de),
Sven Peldszus,
Jan-Philipp Steghöfer,
Thorsten Berger

In case of any concerns, please contact:

Ruhr University Bochum
Universitätsstraße 150
44801 Bochum