What is one DevSecOps best practice and the anti-pattern it replaces?
Quick Answer
Do fail the pipeline fast on Critical and on verified secrets; do not turn every finding into a hard block, because a noisy gate trains developers to bypass it entirely.
Detailed Answer
Do fail the pipeline fast on Critical and on verified secrets; do not turn every finding into a hard block, because a noisy gate trains developers to bypass it entirely.
The anti-pattern usually comes from treating the tool as a checkbox rather than a control people have to live with. A gate that is too loud gets bypassed; a gate that blocks on things nobody can fix gets disabled; a suppression with no expiry becomes a permanent blind spot. The best practice above is the version that survives contact with a real team under delivery pressure.
Generally: make the signal trustworthy (low noise), make the required action clear and achievable, give an honest escape hatch for genuine exceptions, and review suppressions and thresholds on a schedule so the configuration does not quietly rot into "always green, never useful."
Code Example
# Best practice vs anti-pattern (DevSecOps) # DO: fail fast on Critical + verified secrets # DON'T: hard-block on every finding -> team disables the gate # DO: exceptions with an owner and an expiry # DON'T: permanent blanket suppressions -> silent blind spots
Interview Tip
Pair every best practice with the failure it prevents — it shows you learned it the hard way, not from a doc.