Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional Cert Prep

Our entire way of life rests on software foundation. Therefore, the assurance of that foundation is of vital national interest. Yet, the entire field of software security still functions more like a guild than it does a profession. That is because there is no commonly accepted standard body of knowledge, nor is there a well-defined set of abilities required to demonstrate competence. Instead, there is a diverse range of ideas and approaches to the assurance of software, as well as at least three separate fields, computer science, software engineering and computer information systems. That is the reason why the professional societies that govern computing, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Information Systems (AIS) came together to nail down by common agreement exactly what you need to know in order to be a qualified software assurance professional. These recommendations are published in an omnibus document called Cybersecurity Curricular Guidelines (CSEC2017) and that is what you are going to learn in this course.

This course is built around the complete set of recommendations of the CSEC guideline, as well as the workforce recommendations of the NIST/NICE Workforce Framework. The aim here is practical capability, not academic theory. Essentially, rather than software engineering, what you will learn here is the mechanism that is created to assure software assets against potential exploitation. This is established at three levels in the organization, strategic processes, individual project infrastructure and individual testing. You’ll get to examine all three of these from a top-down perspective. You will move from the guideline that defines and relates all of these processes, through the specific itemization of the activities and tasks embodied within its recommendations, down to specific practices used to verify, validate, audit, and resolve software assurance issues. Then you will discover specific case implementations. The aim is for the student to acquire the complete range of things necessary to be fully competent in the field of secure software assurance. 

At the end of this course, you will have a full set of knowledge and capabilities necessary to function as a certified professional in the highly diverse and challenging field of software assurance.