Today, applications are among the attack vectors most exploited by cybercriminals. According to a study conducted by Radware, 98% of organizations were targeted by attacks against their mobile or web applications last year.
In this context, companies must integrate security as early as possible into their development cycles. That’s where Application Security Testing (AST) comes in.
Definition
Application Security Testing (AST) refers to the set of practices and tools used to detect, analyze, and fix security vulnerabilities throughout the software development lifecycle.
Modern development cycles demand speed and agility. Without the right tools, security is often handled late, when some vulnerabilities have already reached production.
AST reverses this logic: it embeds security from the earliest stages of development and analyzes code continuously to prevent rather than react.
Benefits
Application Security Testing (AST) helps protect sensitive application data by detecting programming errors that expose information.
With early vulnerability detection, organizations maintain service continuity by preventing critical flaws from reaching production and control remediation costs, which are much higher post-release.
AST also supports compliance by aligning code with recognized frameworks and regulatory requirements.
AST best practices
AST best practices make security effective and useful without overburdening teams:
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Define secure coding rules and a clear process to detect, prioritize, and fix vulnerabilities
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Limit the number of tools and choose them for their complementarity
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Integrate early, from design and development, and provide basic training in secure coding
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Automate checks in CI/CD so they run automatically with each change
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Cover open-source dependencies: regularly scan libraries for known issues and track licenses
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Follow up after deployment with periodic penetration tests and production monitoring
Yagaan Application Security Testing (AST)
Many AST tools are seen as complex and time-consuming. Yagaan simplifies code analysis and security by applying these best practices: rapid integration with IDEs and CI/CD pipelines, risk-based prioritization, actionable diagnostics (cause, impact), and contextualized remediations that support secure coding.
Powered by its Code Mining technology, Yagaan identifies vulnerabilities, explains their origin, and guides fixes with concrete examples pulled from your codebase.
Application Security Testing is no longer an isolated step or reserved for specialists: with Yagaan, it becomes a lever for efficiency, quality, and resilience across all development teams.
