Stage Gate Management Explained

Credits: Published by our strategic partner Kaiburr

As the technology leader (CDO / CIO / CTO / CISO or a VP of Technology / Engineering / DevOps / DevSecOps /Security / Compliance) you are looking to deliver your digital initiatives in a predictable manner and accelerate maturity of your software product teams while ensuring gaps are not introduced in the software supply chain.

To achieve this you need answers to the following questions:

What is our current level of DevSecOps / DevOps maturity?
Are we really doing the steps we set out to do across various stages of SDLC? How do we identify the tasks falling through the cracks in the software supply chain?
What is our current level of risk on security, compliance, and quality?
How effectively are we using the 15-20 tools procured?

Some examples of common issues in the software supply chain are:

After more than six years of R&D, Kaiburr, a low code /no code digital insight platform, is solving this problem meaningfully and at scale for large enterprises and top innovators. With Kaiburr, digital leaders and software teams get a single pane on their overall stage gates across the entire SDLC at the organization, business unit, portfolio, program, and product (application) level like the following:

Users can drill down on any stage gate to know specific items to be acted upon

[ALM] Stories missing acceptance criteria or story points in tools like JIRA, Azure Boards, Gitlab
[Source Code Mgmt.] Commits and Pull Requests missing traceability to requirements in tools like Bitbucket, GitHub
Acceptance criteria set the bounds for the story and the scope of the work the story entails.[Code Quality] Code quality issues on features in tools like SonarQube
[SAST] Critical static analysis vulnerabilities on the latest code merged in tools like Veracode, Checkmarx
[SCA] Vulnerable libraries downloaded for releases in tools like Snyk, Blackduck
[CI-CD] Build / deployment issues in tools like Jenkins, Tekton, Bamboo, Azure DevOps
[Unit Test] Unit test coverage gaps in tools like JUnit, NUnit
[Functional Test] Test failures in tools like Selenium, Cucumber, Katalon
[Auto Provision] Infrastructure automation issues with tools like Terraform, Pulumi
[Monitoring] Application monitoring issues with tools like Datadog, Dynatrace

Kaiburr adopts the following process for teams to effectively remediate gaps in the software supply chain

To add cherry on top, Kaiburr has mapped out these stage gate validations to industry standard

frameworks like NIST 800 53, CIS, ISO 27k, SOC2, GDPR, FedRAMP, HIPAA, HITRUST, PCI.

Kaiburr has deeply engineered this framework to solve this complex problem:

Software Supply Chain Challenges	How Kaiburr addresses it?
We need to deal with multiple tools used for the same purpose. E.g., JIRA, Azure Board, Rally for ALM; Test Rail, Zephyr, HP ALM for testing	Kaiburr’s canonical models convert tool specific data to functional data. So, data from JIRA, Azure Board, Rally, Gitlab are stored in a common ALM canonical model.
We keep migrating from one tool to another. E.g., we recently moved from Jenkins to Tekton; from Checkmarx to Veracode.	Kaiburr’s canonical models abstract tool data so will have no impact from moving to various tools. Kaiburr essentially future proofs you.
Our processes differ between BUs, portfolios, and teams. Hence it is hard to get a standardized view across these teams. E.g., each of teams have different JIRA workflows, issue types, labels; they follow different branching strategies in github.	Kaiburr can understand different variations of processes implemented by teams in an organization and produce unified standardized output.
We do not consistently tag our usage in various tools. Hence it is hard to know which teams are using what tools and the level of usage.	Kaiburr’s discovery engine can correlate data points and produce a linked view of events across the lifecycle for a given team, project, or initiative

With Kaiburr

Digital leaders can gain near real time visibility on gaps in their SDLC so they can mitigate them early in the cycle
Developers get spoon fed on priorities so their experience and productivity is improved
Security, Compliance and Governance leaders can identify and remediate security and compliance issues in a timely manner Digital leaders can produce audit reports on internal controls in a fully automated manner

If you want to get started with your Stage Gate Compliance journey using Kaiburr reach us at marketing@sifycorp.com

Credits: Published by our strategic partner Kaiburr