Audit Briefing for a Development Lead

Audit Type: ISO/IEC 27001:2022 covering secure software development, change management, access control, DevOps, secure coding, and development environments.

Objective: Verify secure software lifecycle practices, change control, code integrity, and development environment access is aligned with ISO 27001 and Annex A controls.

Your Role & Accountability

As a Development Lead, you are responsible for ensuring secure development practices and implementation of controls particularly: A8.4, 8.18, 8.25-33.

You should be prepared to demonstrate using evidence:

  • Secure coding standards, code review records, and version-controlled development practices
  • Access control restrictions and activity logs for development and test environments
  • Change management aligned with Annex A.8.32, including approvals, rollback, and logging
  • Integration of security tooling and incident responsiveness within CI/CD pipelines
  • Developer security awareness, training, and competency validation

Key Evidence Auditors Will Likely Demand To See:

  • Code repository access logs and review approval history
  • Change tickets and rollback logs for recent deployments
  • Records of secure coding training completion by developers
  • Segregation of development, testing, and production environments with supporting policies
  • Reports or logs from security tools such as SAST, DAST, and vulnerability scanning
  • Information security risk evaluations during development

Audit Readiness Advice

Procedures, workflows, and policy should be backed by logs or documented outputs

Be prepared to demonstrate traceability from requirement through to deployment

Ensure evidence of security code reviews, peer approval, and rejected changes exists

Avoid abstract responses and show proof from source systems and development tooling to answer questions

Prepare examples of controls and processes working effectively in advance of the audit

ISO27001 Mock Audit Questions

These questions can be used to conduct a mock audit of the development controls and processes required to establish compliance with ISO27001.

Failure to provide a satisfactory response indicates a potential non-compliance.

☐ 1. Demonstrate audit trail capability for source code repositories.
☐ 2. Provide MFA enforcement logs for critical development or CI/CD tooling.
☐ 3. Show evidence of your development software bill of materials/asset registry.
☐ 4. Provide evidence of privileged access reviews and removal for developers.
☐ 5. Show onboarding and offboarding records related to development system access.
☐ 6. Provide your secure coding standards and show version-controlled documentation updates.
☐ 7. Show how credentials or secrets are managed and rotated within the build process.
☐ 8. Submit logs from your build pipeline showing automated security checks and results.
☐ 9. Provide approved documentation of your test environment provisioning plan.
☐ 10. Show records that enforce separation between production and development systems.
☐ 11. Provide approved change requests and linked approvals from the last deployment.
☐ 12. Provide rollback documentation and impact logs from a failed or reversed release.
☐ 13. Show how emergency changes are handled and documented under ISO 27001 controls.
☐ 14. Demonstrate effective control of test data and data masking.
☐ 15. Provide evidence that developers cannot deploy code directly to production environments.
☐ 16. Provide access control logs for dev/test environments.
☐ 17. Submit code review logs showing reviewer identity, comments, and approval timestamps.
☐ 18. Provide outputs from static application security testing (SAST) and resolution logs.
☐ 19. Provide system configurations enforcing code signing or artifact integrity.
☐ 20. Show developer competency matrices or evaluations for information security responsibilities.

Supplementary Higher Scrutiny Questions

  • Show any agreed information security risks treatment actions related to development.

  • Show evidence of rejected or flagged code based on secure coding non-compliance.

  • Show how credentials or secrets are managed and rotated within the build process.

  • Submit records of failed builds due to security issues and corrective actions taken.

  • Provide rollback documentation and impact logs from a failed or reversed release.

  • Submit audit logs proving segregation of duty in the change and release process.

  • Provide logs or reports from any environment breach or policy deviation.

  • Submit identity logs showing role-based access for development infrastructure.

  • Provide documented incidents where vulnerabilities were introduced via development activity.

  • Submit root cause analyses and fixes from security-related development incidents.

  • Show documented lessons learned feeding into development practice improvements.

  • Provide evidence of threat modelling or secure design sessions within the SDLC.

  • Show how vulnerability intelligence is used to update development dependencies.

  • Submit developer training logs for secure development and threat awareness.

  • Demonstrate corrective action logs for developers who bypass secure coding controls.

  • Demonstrate the restrictions on privileged utility programs in the development of the lifecycle and approval of any installations.

  • Submit audit logs proving segregation of duty in the change and release process.

  • Provide approved documentation of all planned software modules and related security risk assessments.

  • Show the information security risks assessment of your development assets

Below is a summary of select information security control objectives of particular note to development activity: