Validation of a Secure Programming Concept Inventory

Security failures in software arising from failures to practice secure programming are commonplace. Improving this situation requires that practitioners have a clear understanding of the foundational concepts in secure programming to serve as a basis for building new knowledge and responding to new challenges. We developed a Secure Programing Concept Inventory (SPCI) to measure students' understanding of foundational concepts in secure programming. The SPCI consists of thirty-five multiple choice items targeting ten concept areas of secure programming. The SPCI was developed by establishing the content domain of secure programming, developing a pool of test items, multiple rounds of testing and refining the items, and finally testing and inventory reduction to produce the final scale.

Scale development began by identifying the core concepts in secure programming. A Delphi study was conducted with thirty practitioners from industry, academia, and government to establish the foundational concepts of secure programming and develop a concept map. To build a set of misconceptions in secure programming, the researchers conducted interviews with students and instructors in the field. These interviews were analyzed using content analysis. This resulted in a taxonomy of misconceptions in secure programming covering ten concept areas. An item pool of multiple-choice questions was developed. The item pool of 225 was administered to a population of 690 students across four institutions. Item discrimination and item difficulty scores were calculated, and the best performing items were mapped to the misconception categories to create subscales for each concept area resulting in a validated 35 item scale.