Towards Security-Focused Developer Personas

Developers often assume the responsibility for making software design decisions that could affect software security. Therefore, it is necessary to understand their security motivations, needs, and practices. This work aims to develop a structural framework for creating security-focused developer personas as a tool to guide the identification and segmentation of developer types from a security perspective. Through analyses of developer characteristics in the literature and interviews with 20 software developers, we identified 18 dimensions that form the basis of a structural framework to create security-focused developer personas. We demonstrate the utility of our framework for identifying developer archetypes with varying levels of security focus. Personas developed using our framework can be used to improve software security in various ways, such as guiding the design of security tools tailored to different types of developers and informing the development of security policies and incident response plans that meet developers’ needs and practices.