Security Testing in the Pipeline

Four techniques, each with a different blind spot, which is why treating them as interchangeable produces poor coverage. Static analysis reads source for insecure patterns and has high false positive rates. Dependency scanning matches your components against vulnerability databases and is the highest-value-per-effort of the four. Dynamic analysis exercises a running application and finds what only appears at runtime, but needs a deployed instance and covers only what it reaches. Secret scanning catches credentials in source and history and should block, always.

The defining implementation problem is signal-to-noise. A scanner producing 4,000 findings, mostly irrelevant, is reliably ignored — and teams then add an exception rule for the whole tool. Tuning is not optional: suppress rules that do not apply to your stack, triage by exploitability and reachability rather than by raw CVSS, and gate the build only on the classes you have decided are non-negotiable.

The sequencing that works: block on new critical findings and on secrets, report everything else, and drive the existing backlog down on a plan. Blocking on the accumulated backlog from day one stops all delivery and guarantees the control is removed.