Continuous Development and Testing of Access and Usage Control: A Systematic Literature Review

Context: Development and testing of access/usage control systems is a growing research area. With new trends in software development such as DevOps, the development of access/usage control also has to evolve. Objective: The main aim of this paper is to provide an overview of research proposals in the area of continuous development and testing of access and usage control systems. Method: The paper uses a Systematic Literature Review as a research method to define the research questions and answer them following a systematic approach. With the specified search string, 210 studies were retrieved. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria in two phases, a final set of 20 primary studies was selected for this review. Results: Results show that primary studies are mostly published in security venues followed by software engineering venues. Furthermore, most of the studies are based on the standard XACML access control language. In addition, a significant portion of the proposals for development and testing is automated with test assessment and generation the most targeted areas. Some general guidelines for leveraging continuous developing and testing of the usage and access control systems inside the DevOps process are also provided.