Technical and Personal Factors Influencing Developers' Adoption of Security Tools

Abstract

Security tools analyze programs to help software developers write more secure code. Although these tools have been demonstrated to find vulnerabilities that human developers may not, many developers do not use them, leaving software needlessly vulnerable. To help understand why, we describe a theoretical account of factors that influence developers' adoption decisions. This model was developed based on interviews with 42 professional developers, and is a first step toward a comprehensive theory of security tool adoption based on diffusion of innovations theory.