Why Compliance in Software Development Matters
There are a lot of reasons for making compliance a core aspect of your software development practices. First and foremost, compliance requirements exist to protect your users – from data breaches, cybersecurity attacks, and failures that jeopardize mission-critical functionality.
Compliance is often a requirement for simply doing business. This can mean complying with the requirements of a specific industry – HIPAA for healthcare, FedRAMP for US government – or with more general requirements such as GDPR for software serving Europeans.
Adhering to recognized compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 enhances trust in your organization while simultaneously protecting your customers. It encourages uniform coding standards, testing practices, and documentation processes, all of which contribute to higher-quality software. When it’s time for an audit (internal or external), having a clear record of what was done, when, and by whom, makes accountability straightforward.
Compliance is the foundation of creating secure, trustworthy, and sustainable software. Whether you’re meeting regulatory requirements or trying to maintain your ISO 27001, failure to comply can lead to heavy fines, legal actions, and reputational damage; not to mention the even more severe consequences for customers using your software. Compliance checklists serve as both a catalyst for, and evidence of due diligence, allowing organizations to demonstrate their commitment to maintaining high standards in software development.
How Checklists Promote Compliant Software Development
Checklists are a deceptively simple, but incredibly effective tool for ensuring compliance that can be integrated into every stage of the software development lifecycle. Using checklists in software development can improve quality and compliance by:
- Preventing mistakes and omissions with step-by-step guidance
- Increasing visibility regarding who is responsible for which tasks and what has been completed
- Standardizing processes across teams and projects
- Documenting compliance efforts for audits and internal reviews
Beyond these important advantages of using a list, Checklists for Jira provides additional features that help you ensure compliance in your Jira software projects:
- Global checklists – Global checklists are created and managed by Jira admins and automatically applied to work items via a context. Users can toggle checklist item, but cannot add, modify or delete them.
- The ability to grant permissions to view/interact with checklists only to specific users (work item assignee, reviewers, approvers, etc.).
- User mentions with email notifications – Checklists can be configured to send email notifications when an item is assigned to a user, making them an easy way to manage approvals.
- Full integration with Jira automation allowing you to ensure standardization and compliance by building your processes into Jira.
- Workflow validators to enforce that checklists on Jira work items are complete before the work item can be transitioned.
- A complete checklist history / change log to meet the compliance audit tracking requirements.
Sample Checklists for Compliant Software Development
You can use checklists to ensure compliance with your internal coding and deployment standards, Definition of Ready, Definition of Done, and Acceptance Criteria, as well as with externally imposed industry requirements. Below are some example checklists.
👉 Hint: You can copy and paste these lists to form your own global checklists.
✅ Code Review Compliance
- Adherence to secure coding practices
- Absence of hardcoded credentials or variables
- Sufficient test coverage
- Logging and error handling reviews
- Compliance with naming conventions
✅ Release and Deployment Readiness
- Verified rollback plan
- Approval from QA and product
- Verified change logs
- Security scan completed
- Regulatory notifications (if applicable)
✅ Third-Party Dependency Compliance
- License type is approved
- Package is actively maintained
- No known critical vulnerabilities
- Reviewed and documented usage
✅ GDPR/Privacy Compliance
- Data minimization and anonymization
- User consent records
- Right to be forgotten processes
- Data storage and transfer encryption
✅ HIPAA Compliance (Regulatory Compliance)
- Unique login credentials
- Role-based access
- Automatic logoff
- Emergency access
- Multi-factor authentication
- Tracking data access
- End-to-end encryption
- SSL and TLS transmission
- Offsite data backup
- Sign business associate agreements
✅ Development Team Onboarding and Offboarding Compliance
- Granting appropriate access based on role
- NDA and policy agreement verification
- Timely revocation of credentials upon exit
- Equipment security review
- GDPR training
Compliance with Required Approvals
Building or updating software may require that changes be approved by internal reviewers, cybersecurity or data protection officers, or the team responsible for ensuring a consistent UI throughout your product. A checklist can be used to notify approvers and track their responses. The list makes it easy to see where a work item is at in the chain of approvals, and is simpler than building an approval workflow.
Enforcing Software Development Compliance
It’s one thing to have rules, and another thing to ensure that they’re followed. Even with the best of intentions, compliance efforts can fail if there’s no enforcement mechanism. In Jira, workflow validators serve as an enforcement tool.
Checklists for Jira has three built-in validators, so you can block a work item from being transitioned unless:
- All checklist items are complete
- All mandatory checklist items are complete
- A checklist is present on the Jira work item
Thus using a Global checklist, backed up by a workflow validator gives you a rock-solid way to build your compliance practices into Jira.
Demonstrating Compliant Software Development
Of course the most important reason for developing compliant software is to protect customers, users, and everyone who is impacted by your software. But you also have to protect yourself, which means not only do you have to develop compliant software – you have to be able to show that you’re in compliance at any moment.
Checklists can help here too. When a developer toggles a checklist item, they are attesting to having completed the required step. Checklists for Jira includes a record of all changes to the checklist, giving you a complete history and providing the audit tracking that’s required by many compliance frameworks.
Regardless of your industry, checklists promote compliant software development by allowing you to track regulatory compliance, required approvals, and all the changes made along the way. To see compliance checklists in action, check out these articles about how HeroCoders uses Global checklists for internal QA, and how Mainstream Technologies uses checklists to ensure regulatory compliance.
