Episode #12 - Ball and Chain of Custody - Legal Requirements

Last Episode recap

• In the last episode we discussed Jenkins. We talked about what it is, what it is not and how it can be configured to use in your automation efforts.

Summary of this episode

• I hope you have seen that I’m trying to do these episodes in what I think is a very specific order. We will build on each episode so that you understand how each topic discussed can be used to enhance your automation effort.
• In this episode, we will discuss maintaining a software “chain of custody”, why it is important, what happens if you don’t and how your automation can help you do it.

What's in it for you

• A better understanding of the importance of maintaining good software controls and how it keeps you and your company out of trouble.

Episode Content:

• Why does it matter?
  • In 2001, a large corporation named Enron was embroiled in a controversy involving its financial records. It was followed by other controversies with other large publicly traded corporations.
  • In July of 2002, two U.S. Congressmen, Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes and Sen. Michael G. Oxley, sponsored a bill to rein in the fraudulent financial reporting that led to these massive corruption scandals. This bill was titled the Sarbanes-Oxley Corporate Responsibility Act of 2002 (or SOX for short).
  • The bill tightened controls around how a company recorded and reported its financial Information.
  • One of its goals was to provide for structured, consistent and repeatable controls.
  • It was created as a way to for the leaders and employees of a company to create and maintain a culture of corporate financial responsibility.
  • It provided for the officers of a company to “sign” their financial statements. This means that they take personal responsibility that they are accurate and correct with no malfeasance or attempts at fraud against investors.
  • It increased the fines and sentences for individuals that attempt to commit fraud or illegal financial practices.
  • It requires a company to document its internal control processes.
  • It requires a company to to have an external auditor to certify that their internal control processes are being followed and that the financials are accurate.
  • It dictates that all off-balance sheet transactions must be reported.
  • It provides the Security and Exchange Commission more power to perform investigate any company suspected of violations.

• Who has to comply?
  • All publicly traded companies
  • All subsidiaries of foreign companies in the U.S.
  • All private companies that are preparing for an IPO
• Fines and Prison Time
  • Non-compliance could result in fines up to $1 million dollars and up to 10 years in jail
  • If a company intentionally defrauds investors, it could result in $5 million dollars in fines and up to 20 years in jail.

• When should you worry about it?
  • You shouldn’t worry about it too much but,
  • You should make sure that your control processes are well documented, your staff understands why they are in place, and any consequences that they or the company might face if they do not follow the controls.
• Where should they be implemented in your SDLC?
  • In my opinion, every step of the SDLC, for example:
    • Requirements – should be documented and changes should be tracked.
    • Development – All source code should be in an SCM system so that any changes can be tracked back to why and who made the change.
    • Build – All builds should be documented and all artifacts of the build process should be stored and versioned.
    • Testing – all test cases that are used to verify requirement functionality should be documented and any results of those test cases related to a specific build should be tagged with the build ID and archived after completion.
    • Environments – All changes to an environment used for a specific build should be tagged and documented for approval prior to implementation.
    • Deploy – The reason for the deployment, date and time, and approval should all be documented.
    • Promotion to a higher environment – all approvals should be documented and tracked for each environment promotion.

• How can your automation help you with all this documentation?
  • By using some or all of the tools that we are discussing, you can have a lot of this documentation done for you automatically by your automation.
  • For Example:
    • Requirements: Jira, Quality Center
    • Development: Github, Bitbucket, SVN, Team Foundation Server
    • Build: Maven, Gradle, Jenkins, CI/CD pipelines
    • Testing: qTest, Quality Center, Bugzilla
    • Environments: CI/CD, Jira
    • Deploy: CI/CD, Jenkins, Ansible, Terraform
    • Promotion: Jira, Remedy, ServiceNow

• Each of these tools will automatically record the changes that you make, builds that run, tests that are performed, and artifacts that are deployed.
• Using Jenkins or a similar tool, you can create a pipeline or job that can automatically create the files required by your audit partners to run their reviews.
• Usually the only changes to be reviewed after automation are any changes that are made to the automation pipeline/jobs themselves.
• Working with internal and external auditors can be a daunting task since they are trained to ask many probing questions to identify problems with your process.
• Using automation makes their and your job easier when it is time to perform these control reviews, which is usually monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annually.

recap of this episode

• In this episode we discussed what software chain of custody is, why it is important, where it originated, how it is controlled, and how your automation can assist you in financial reporting compliance audits.

Next Episode: Artifact repositories

Episode #9 - Tools - BitBucket vs GitHub

BitBucket is Atlassian's offering that encapsulates Git.  They have an entire suite of products that enable end-to-end collaboration.

It has a lot of the same features as GitHUb:
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- It is built on top of Git.
- It is used for source code mgmt.
- It has pull requests to facilitate code reviews.
- It has branching and merging.
- It has forking.
- It has webhooks.

But it also has other features as well:
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- It is directly integrated with Atlassian's other tools (Jira (task tracking), Confluence (Collaboration), Crowd (LDAP)).
- It provides a tighter structure to its repositories.
- It provides tighter security through it's integration with Crowd.
- It facilitates collaboration through its integration with Jira and Confluence.
- It provides end-to-end tracking when a branch is created from a Jira ticket.

Pros:
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- It can be hosted in Atlassian's cloud environment or it can be on-prem at your company.
- It has a high availability Data Center version.
- It has unlimited repositories for free for up to 5 users.
- Is is supposed to have better searching but we have found it lacking in regards to wildcard searches.
- You can import your code from more SCM systems than GitHub.
- Powerful Jira integration can update Jira ticket status on BitBucket commit.
- Offers in-line comments directly in the code review window.
- Integrates directly with Trello.
- Integrates with Slack.
- Better pricing (GitHub private repos can be pricey).
- Powerful ACL thanks to integration with Crowd (think LDAP server with groups).

Cons:
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- Smaller community
- Fewer plugins
- Wildcard searches

My Take:
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Using the Atlassian suite enables you to have end-to-end tracking of source code changes that starts with the entry of the requirement into a Jira ticket.

Next episode:  CI/CD Basics

Episode #7 - Tools - Github

Description of GitHub
- hosted platform for managing your source code from creation/ideation to production
- built-in actions and workflows to control your code build and deploys while not leaving GitHub's platform.

GitHub Project Structure
- It can be as varied as the languages that you can code in.

readme files
- how to tell the world about your GitHub project
- uses markdown for formatting

Pros/Cons of using GitHub
- Easy access for anyone with an internet connection
- Built-in process to enhance automation
- Its in the cloud....always a risk
- Only as good as what you put into it
- Concerns about Intellectual Property
- Concerns about security tokens, passwords, IDs, SSH keys, etc.

Workflows
- automate tasks directly in GitHub

Webhooks
- Used to drive automation tasks with other systems (or within GitHub itself)

GitHub Pages
- a website for your project....done right from your GitHub repo
- can use a custom domain name that you own

Integrations
- Integrates with almost any tool via Webhooks
- GitHUb has developed a lot of their own offerings around certain technologies

Code Review
- It all starts with a pull request
- diffs, history, blame
- embedded chat
- conflict resolution
- Integrations with other code review tools

GitHub Actions (or features/workflows)
- automation workflows built into GitHub
- run on any event
- hosted runners for most major OS flavors
- parallel builds for different OS or browser combination
- supports many languages
- users can build their own runners
- live logging for real-time build debugging
- built in secrets management

GitHub Products
- Atom - IDE
- Electron - Open source cross platform development with javascript, html, and css
- GitHub LFS - Large file storage offering
- IDE Plugins
- Mobile App
- GitHub Marketplace
- GitHub Security Lab

Git Merge Conference in March 2020 - Sponsored by GitHub

Coming up next - A look at BitBucket - Atlassian's Git offering.

Episode #6 - Tools - Git from Asheville-NC

Episode #6 - Tools - Git from Asheville-NC
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Where I am podcasting from - Asheville, NC

Target Audience - Technology resources that are new to development or to this tool in particular

SCM description

Git description

Git terminology
-init - Create a new repository (from empty dir or existing source folders).

-config - Set the user.name and user.email config settings for the current user.

-origin - This indicates the starting point of the current branch.

-remote - This indicates where the push command will try to send your changes on the remote system.

-branch - This is an isolated work area for you to make your changes.

-types of branches - master, develop, development, feature, release, hotfix.

-checkout - This is the act of copying the selected branch to a working area where you can make your changes.

-local branch - A branch that is created on your local machine from the remote source.  It can be a new branch created locally that you will then commit and push to the remote.

-status - This command shows the current status of any files in your local workspace that have been modified, staged for commit, ready to push to the remote.....or any errors.

-add - This command readies your modified files to commit.  It is typically used when you create new un-committed files that are not currentlyin git.

-commit - This is the act of telling git that you want to copy your modified files to the branch on your local machine that you have checked out.  You will still need to issue a push command to send the changes to the branch on the remote server.

-commit message - always add a descriptive message of what changes were made and why.  It is useful to put any reference ticket number from your issue tracking system in the commit message.

-merge - This is the act of combining two branches that have different sets of code.  It is done automatically if there are no conflicts.

-merge conflict - This occurs when the same file is modified by two or more developers and their changes involve the same lines of code in the files.

-diff - This is a utility that can be used from the command line to compare two files to display the conflicting differences.

-pull requests - The act of having another developer or team lead review your changes before it is merged into another branch.

-push - This command will copy our changes from your local branch to the remote branch as long as there are no conflicts.  This conflict check can be over-ridden with a command flag.

-pull - This is the command that will pull all the up-to-date information from git regarding your source code respository (branches, tags, etc.)

-clone - This is the act of copying a remote repositort to another workspace where you can make your modifications in isolation from other developers.

-fork - This command allows you to create a copy of a repository that you will not be merging back into the remote for some time (or in certain cases, not at all).

-tags - This is a command line utility that allows you to mark certain sets of files with an identifying tag (numeric, alpha-numeric, or alphabetic).

-branching methodology - This is the decision made by your team on how you will handle parallel development that will involve merging your code from branch to branch before you finally promote it to production (master).

-gitFlow - A commonly used branching methodology.

-log - This command line utility can be used to view changes to a file or set of files.

-revert - This command is used to undo a commit.

-reset - This command is used when you wish to discard all your local changes and revert back to the latest on the remote server. It is not recommended if you follow your branching methodology.