An Integrated Maturity Model for modern software development: addressing Security, Artificial Intelligence and Governance in DevOps

Software is now a strategic asset for almost every business. As such, new technologies and features are needed, and so, AI-infused solutions are becoming more frequent. Also, as software is part of every infrastructure, even critical ones, it becomes a more attractive target for cybersecurity attacks. To build software that can be seen as trustworthy, organizations need to improve their processes and integrate different skills, methods, capabilities, and practices. A way to achieve it is by using a maturity model that can lead that improvement path. Since the current maturity models present limitations – our literature review shows they are considered to be static, focused on specific contexts, and built with a closed architecture, we set ourselves with the goal of building a new maturity model that addresses these limitations. Our goal is to develop a model that can integrate capabilities and practices useful for producing AI-infused software with cybersecurity in mind, based on an open-architecture that allows for integrating future domains and be evolved by organizations that use it. We defined an iterative methodology for producing this maturity model that integrates in every iteration a validation step by academic and industrial partners. As we finish the first iteration, which addresses cybersecurity capabilities, we are starting the validation process for this increment, but preliminary results show our methodology to be leading to sound results.