Introduction

Businesses are creating and launching software faster than ever to keep pace with competitors and drive innovation. The focus on increased speed has created a few trends:

1. Developer productivity is no longer only measured by speed, but quality and security as well
2. Many development teams rely on platform engineering to build tools that enable developer autonomy
3. Cloud adoption has become an enabling standard
4. Automation has an impact on the speed of delivery and thus has become an expected feature

With these trends in mind, the question becomes: How do you balance speed vs. trust? While fast releases are essential to meet market and user demands, sacrificing trust for speed can lead to severe business repercussions.

Trust is an organisational asset that is increasing in importance to enterprises, and is often referred to as the Trust Factor. This is an important measure that embodies to what degree customers, business partners, and employees trust an organisation. Trust is crucial for all  business stakeholders; case in point, 93% of business executives polled in a 2024 PwC survey agreed that building and maintaining trust improves their bottom line.

Ownership, Control, and Compliance: Three Elements of a Trusted Software Factory

Imagine software development as an industrial factory or manufacturing plant. To run this trusted “software factory” effectively, three key elements determine success: Ownership, Control, and Compliance.

This can be broken down into roles:

1. Ownership – Factory Worker (Developer, Data Scientist): They are the owners and creators of the software.
2. Control – Factory Manager (DevOps, DevSecOps, MLOps): They instill and manage control points within the pipeline.
3. Compliance – Regulator (CISO, CIO, GRC, MLOps, DevOps): These individuals are responsible for ensuring that the software factory builds reliable trusted solutions that deliver the expected outcomes, while complying with both internal company policies and external regulations.

For this “software factory” system to achieve its goals, orchestration and collaboration are essential. Siloed teams, tool sprawl, and a lack of shared understanding of the software pipeline can significantly erode trust. Achieving end-to-end trust involves managing ownership, control, and compliance at every step of the software pipeline to prevent costly compromises.

Issues related to trust are commonplace in the world of software development, and with the increased expectations around accountability, everyone from the business owners to each individual owner of each step in the “production line” plays a critical role.

Challenges Facing the Software Factory

Implementing Ownership, Control, and Compliance at scale can be challenging for a few key reasons:

• Scale complicates management: Businesses often manage hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of software components that are used to deliver their application solutions or services. This makes it challenging to track and manage each component’s impact on the overall application ecosystem. Current approaches often involve manual effort, are prone to error, and may lack proper integration. Therefore, a unified approach is essential for clarity, efficiency, and gaining visibility into each application.
• Securing the Software At Every Stage: A critical challenge in software delivery is embedding security throughout the entire production lifecycle. Businesses can only scale effectively when they have consistent visibility and control at critical points. When multiple paths to production exist, security risks increase exponentially. Teams should share common tools and by reducing complexity, businesses increase visibility which in turn allows them to reduce risk and increase ability to trust the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) approach.
• Putting Your Trust in Evidence to Achieve Compliance: Compliance demands tangible evidence; proof that policies have been followed, not just they exist. This proof needs to be linked together, forming a chain of evidence from the moment that the release is identified, through to release. Given the complexity of the modern SDLC, which comprises an array of teams, tools, workflows, microservices, and development stages, capturing evidence in a reliable, scalable way is complicated. Evidence should be generated automatically at each relevant stage, with tools triggering. Automatically. Proving a release is “trusted” becomes much easier when teams can demonstrate that each production release has passed all tests or received approved exceptions.
• A Disconnect Between Deliverables and Dispersed Metadata: Fragmented metadata spread across disparate systems leads to operational burdens and increased risk. If all the teams involved with building, securing and running these software solutions don’t have unified access to this critical data, then no one has visibility into the overall Trust Factor for the entire enterprise. A unified system of record is necessary to consolidate all application-related information.

Building Trusted Applications Without Sacrificing Speed

The key to mastering the balance between speed to market and building trust is to unify the software factory: bringing Ownership, Control, and Compliance together into one system of record.

Here are some actionable best practices to align your software factory:

Set a Foundation for Visibility and Governance

• Implement a unified, automated approach to track and manage application owners.
• Utilise a solution to collect evidence from anywhere in the SDLC, allowing teams to prove adherence to any policy.
• Unify a system of record to connect metadata, building an audit trail teams can trust.
• Look at the data teams generate, and see if there are overlaps to align data for new use cases.
• Identify how teams measure your Trust Factor, and make it visible across the whole enterprise.

Integrate Security, Controls, and Policies

• Integrate both proactive and reactive controls to power security in the software from code to runtime.
• Develop and enforce a single path into production for all software.

Encourage Collaboration and Alignment

• Ensure that all the teams involved in building, securing, and maintaining your software solutions have an understanding (and access) to the information generated across your software supply chain. Create a unified group of collaborators who work together, not in silos.

The result of these efforts is the ability to truly trust the software and ML supply chain. The ideal vision for modern software delivery is to have a framework of people, processes, and technologies working together. Teams can then manage risk with policies, and make business risk decisions based on hard evidence, at any scale.

This requires everyone in the software factory to buy in. Software development is a team sport, and the team wins when everyone trusts each other and shares information. This trust begins with trusting the system of record around application development to improve communication.