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The Best Security Tool Is the One Developers Actually Use

Security products compete on detectors and integrations. They should compete on friction. The adoption gap starts in the developer's IDE, not the CISO's budget.

DevEx 22 February 2026 · 2 min read

I spent years watching security teams buy tools that developers hated. Expensive platforms with hundreds of check boxes on a RFP matrix that sat unused because the CLI was slow, the API was undocumented, and the false positive rate made the output meaningless.

The adoption equation

Here’s the pattern I’ve seen across every security programme I’ve worked with:

Adoption = (Value × Ease) − Friction

Most security products compete on value. More detectors, more integrations, more coverage maps. But they ignore ease and actively increase friction. The result is a tool that looks incredible in a bake-off and collects dust in production.

What good DevEx looks like in security

At Veracode, I worked with customers who had wildly different adoption rates for the same product. The difference wasn’t the tool — it was the integration experience:

  • Fast feedback loops. Developers who got scan results in their IDE within 30 seconds fixed 3x more findings than those waiting for a nightly batch scan.
  • Contextual guidance. “SQL injection on line 47” is a finding. “Here’s the specific parameter to sanitise and a link to the framework’s built-in protection” is a fix.
  • Low-noise defaults. Teams that tuned their policies to surface only high-confidence, high-impact findings saw developer engagement double.

Building for the reluctant user

Most developers don’t want to interact with security tooling. It’s not a product they chose — it’s an obligation. Designing for a reluctant user means:

  1. Zero config where possible — sensible defaults that work out of the box
  2. Incremental depth — simple for the 80% case, powerful for the 20%
  3. Respecting the developer’s workflow — meet them in CI/CD, in the IDE, in the PR. Don’t make them open your dashboard.

The companies that understand this are winning. Not because their security is better in an absolute sense, but because their security is actually used. And the security you use is always better than the security you don’t.

I’m building customersuccess.guide partly to explore this — how adoption-first thinking changes the way you design, sell, and support a product.