Automated Building of an Environment for Secure Software Development in Web Technologies Courses

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the automated building of verified software environments that can be used in university courses. Over the last couple of years, it has become obvious that using online environments, video meetings, virtual lectures, online teaching, and learning is not a matter of choice. The coronavirus pandemic forced all parts of the education systems, and even of life, to go online. Deepening the research and development in the software automation field can lead to using various ways to allow university students and learners to "get in touch with” the real-world problems in software development. We developed such an approach by defining the steps, developing and evaluating specific automation processes of building an environment for secure software development. We defined both the functional and nonfunctional requirements for such a system, and the next major steps in development, such as virtualization setup (kvm), virtual environment (virtual machines) definition and creation, database configuration and management of user settings, have been defined and developed. The evaluation is performed according to the specifics defined in the Web technologies course, but the results and use are not limited to that course alone. In conclusion, the results of the evaluation conducted in a laboratory setting have been presented and appropriate scenarios, applications and future work have been defined. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.