Demographic-based perceptions of adequacy of software security's presence within individual phases of the software development life cycle

The topic of software security has become paramount in information technology (IT) related scholarly research. Researchers have addressed numerous software security topics touching on all phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC): requirements gathering phase, design phase, development phase, testing phase, and maintenance phase. However, the opinions and assumptions of those contributing to the data collection for the studies could be influenced by factors that were outside the control of the researchers and scholarly research methodologies. Demographics was identified as one of those factors that may influence perception of software security's presence within the individual phases of the SDLC. The purpose of this quantitative non-experimental study was to investigate the effects of demographics on perceptions of software security's presence within the individual phases of the SDLC as perceived by IT professionals; these perceptions directly influenced the data gathered for the scholarly studies. This study evaluated effects of gender, age, race, education, and income on perceptions of the software security within the individual phases of the SDLC. The sample of IT professionals registered with Zoomerang was surveyed and responses coded. After running non-parametric tests on data gathered from the sample, it was determined that the demographic variables selected for this study do not significantly affect perceptions of security's presence within individual phases of the SDLC. Thus, the variance in perceptions of the software security's presence within the SDLC as observed in the scholarly literature can be attributed to factors other than the demographic variables selected for this study.