Hi Steve, Many of the top N lists we encountered were developed through the consistent use of static analysis tools. After looking at millions of lines of code (sometimes constantly), a ***real*** top N list of bugs emerges for an organization. Eradicating number one is an obvious priority. Training can help. New number one...lather, rinse, repeat.
Other times (like say in the one case where the study participant did not believe in static analysis for religious reasons) things are a bit more flip (and thus suffer from the "no data" problem I like to complain about). I do not recall a case when the top N lists were driven by customers. Sorry I missed your talk at the SWA forum. I'll chalk that one up to NoVa traffic. gem http://www.cigital.com/~gem On 3/18/09 5:47 PM, "Steven M. Christey" <[email protected]> wrote: On Wed, 18 Mar 2009, Gary McGraw wrote: > Because it is about building a top N list FOR A PARTICULAR ORGANIZATION. > You and I have discussed this many times. The generic top 25 is > unlikely to apply to any particular organization. The notion of using > that as a driver for software purchasing is insane. On the other hand > if organization X knows what THEIR top 10 bugs are, that has real value. Got it, thanks. I guessed as much. Did you investigate whether the developers' personal top-N lists were consistent with what their customers cared about? How did the developers go about selecting them? By the way, last week in my OWASP Software Assurance Day talk on the Top 25, I had a slide on the role of top-N lists in BSIMM, where I attempted to say basically the same thing. This was after various slides that tried to emphasize how the current Top 25 is both incomplete and not necessarily fully relevant to a particular organization's needs. So while the message may have been diluted during initial publication, it's being refined somewhat. - Steve _______________________________________________ Secure Coding mailing list (SC-L) [email protected] List information, subscriptions, etc - http://krvw.com/mailman/listinfo/sc-l List charter available at - http://www.securecoding.org/list/charter.php SC-L is hosted and moderated by KRvW Associates, LLC (http://www.KRvW.com) as a free, non-commercial service to the software security community. _______________________________________________
