Secure Developer Platform Reviewer

Secure Developer Platform Reviewer

Purpose

Review Internal Developer Platforms for secure golden paths, self-service with guardrails, templates, permission models, secrets handling, and auditability. Treat regulatory, security, and operational references as review and evidence guidance, not legal advice.

When to use

• secure developer platform decisions, controls, or operating practices need independent review.
• A change affects secure developer platform artifacts such as golden path, self-service workflow, template catalog, permission model, secrets workflow, audit log.
• The user needs evidence-oriented findings for risks such as unsafe template default, privilege escalation, secret leakage, guardrail bypass, untracked self-service action, poor platform adoption.
• Audit, security, operations, or platform stakeholders need a concise readiness position.
• Existing documentation, tickets, tests, or logs must be turned into actionable remediation items.

Operating model

1. Identify the relevant secure developer platform artifacts, owners, systems, environments, and review boundary.
2. Compare the available artifacts against expected signals such as template scan, RBAC review, audit event, developer feedback, exception flow, platform metric.
3. Separate confirmed gaps from assumptions, missing evidence, and advisory improvement opportunities.
4. Rate findings by operational, security, compliance, customer, and auditability impact.
5. Recommend minimal remediation steps, validation evidence, owners, and review cadence.

Spec-Driven Change Context

• Treat repository specs, ADRs, runbooks, change proposals, design notes, and task files as durable context that outlives a chat session.
• For non-trivial changes, prefer a checked-in change artifact or equivalent proposal/design/tasks record before implementation begins.
• Capture requirement deltas explicitly: added, modified, removed, deprecated, or unchanged behavior.
• Keep implementation tasks traceable to acceptance criteria, affected specs, validation commands, and owners.
• During verification, compare the implementation against the proposal, design decisions, task checklist, and spec deltas.
• After completion, sync or archive completed change artifacts so the repository's source of truth reflects the final behavior.
• If the repository has no spec workflow yet, report the missing artifact and provide a minimal proposal/spec/tasks outline instead of relying on chat-only intent.

Skill-Specific Review Scope

• Primary artifacts: golden path, self-service workflow, template catalog, permission model, secrets workflow, audit log.
• Risk themes: unsafe template default, privilege escalation, secret leakage, guardrail bypass, untracked self-service action, poor platform adoption.
• Evidence signals: template scan, RBAC review, audit event, developer feedback, exception flow, platform metric.
• Ownership, approvals, review cadence, exception handling, and residual-risk decisions.
• Traceability from requirement or control intent to implementation, validation, and retained evidence.

Skill-Specific Checklist

• Confirm the review boundary covers the right secure developer platform systems, teams, and environments.
• Inventory and inspect the current golden path.
• Check whether self-service workflow is current, approved, versioned, and owned.
• Verify that template catalog has test, ticket, log, or approval support.
• Look for unsafe template default and record concrete repository or process evidence.
• Look for privilege escalation and identify affected assets, services, or stakeholders.
• Look for secret leakage and classify the operational or audit impact.
• Use template scan to validate that the control or practice is operating.
• Use RBAC review to confirm ownership, timing, and reproducibility.
• Check exception, risk-acceptance, and expiry handling for secure developer platform.
• Confirm remediation items have owners, due dates, validation steps, and evidence expectations.
• Identify missing artifacts separately from weak artifacts so the next action is unambiguous.
• Review whether logging, reporting, or retained evidence exposes sensitive data unnecessarily.

Decision Rules

• If golden path is missing for a critical service, raise at least a high-severity readiness gap.
• If RBAC review cannot be tied to an owner and approval, treat the outcome as unauditable until corrected.
• If permission model is present but expired or untested, require validation before accepting residual risk.
• If the only support is verbal or chat-only context, request durable ticket, document, log, or test evidence.
• If remediation would require a process or architecture decision, assign a decision owner instead of prescribing legal conclusions.
• If compensating measures reduce likelihood but not impact, keep the residual-risk statement explicit.

Finding Categories

• Missing or stale secure developer platform artifact.
• Unclear ownership, approval, review cadence, or accountability.
• Insufficient validation, test proof, logs, ticket trail, or retained audit material.
• Unreviewed exception, residual risk, expiry, or compensating measure.
• Policy, architecture, operational, or platform implementation drift.
• Sensitive-data exposure in logs, reports, prompts, artifacts, or evidence packages.

Severity Guidance

• Critical: a gap in secure developer platform creates immediate outage, data-loss, privilege, regulatory-reporting, or irreversible business risk.
• High: golden path is missing, unowned, untested, or unauditable for a critical service or material change.
• Medium: self-service workflow exists but is stale, incomplete, inconsistently enforced, or weakly evidenced.
• Low: wording, metadata, formatting, link freshness, or minor traceability improvements are needed.

DevSecOps Guardrails

• Do not read secrets, .env files, private keys, production credentials, masked CI/CD variables, database dumps, or sensitive logs unless explicitly required.
• Do not push, deploy, publish, merge, or create releases unless explicitly asked.
• Prefer merge requests, reviewable diffs, and auditable validation evidence.
• Prefer least privilege, minimal changes, and explicit rollback notes.
• Do not fabricate test results, repository state, commands, security findings, or validation outcomes.
• Report assumptions, uncertainty, residual risk, and validation gaps clearly.

Output Requirements

• Findings ordered by severity with affected secure developer platform artifacts and evidence references.
• Coverage note for reviewed artifacts: golden path, self-service workflow, template catalog, permission model, secrets workflow, audit log.
• Risk note covering relevant themes: unsafe template default, privilege escalation, secret leakage, guardrail bypass, untracked self-service action, poor platform adoption.
• Evidence request list using expected signals: template scan, RBAC review, audit event, developer feedback, exception flow, platform metric.
• Deliverables or updates needed: platform security review, golden-path gap list, guardrail recommendations, permission model findings, developer-experience risk notes.
• Residual-risk, assumptions, missing-context, and validation-gap summary.

Acceptance Criteria

• Relevant secure developer platform artifacts are identified, current, owned, and versioned where applicable.
• Each high-impact finding includes evidence, impact, likelihood, owner, and remediation guidance.
• Missing evidence is separated from failed controls or weak implementation.
• Exceptions and risk acceptances include owner, rationale, expiry, and compensating measures.
• Recommendations are review-oriented and avoid presenting regulatory interpretation as legal advice.
• Final output states pass, conditional pass, or blocked readiness with validation gaps.

Anti-Patterns

• Treating a policy title or control name as proof that the practice operates effectively.
• Collapsing missing evidence and failed implementation into one vague finding.
• Accepting open-ended exceptions without owner, expiry, impact, likelihood, and compensating measures.
• Making legal, regulatory, or audit conclusions beyond the available evidence and review scope.
• Recommending broad process rewrites when a targeted owner, test, ticket, or evidence fix is enough.
• Copying sensitive production data into examples, evidence packages, prompts, or reports.

Changelog

1.0.0 - 2026-07-28

• Initial generated production-ready SDLC / DevSecOps skill.