Agile Penetration Testing: Adapting Scope and Targets through Material Code Change Detection

Traditional penetration tests are too slow for modern development.

They often require weeks of back-and-forth between security and engineering just to figure out what to test–never mind the test itself. And in the time it takes to scope targets manually, the codebase has already changed.

Agile penetration testing turns this problem on its head. By automatically detecting material changes in the code and linking them to application architecture and risk, teams can continuously scope and trigger pentests without slowing down delivery or pulling engineers into unnecessary conversations.

Here’s how that looks.

Stop testing what doesn’t matter

The goal of agile penetration testing isn’t to run more tests. It’s to make each test count by focusing only on: what has changed and what is risky.

This means continuously monitoring for material code changes that could introduce real security impact, application architecture updates that affect the attack surface, and new components or connections that create paths to sensitive data or critical systems.

Once these changes are detected, workflows can automatically trigger scoped penetration tests, assign relevant tickets, and surface the right context to the security team without adding noise or interrupting development.

What makes this approach possible?

Agile penetration testing relies on visibility and automation. Specifically:

1. A real inventory of your application components

To facilitate efficient penetration testing, it is crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of the application’s code components. By utilizing code analysis tools, organizations can automatically identify and catalog all the code components, including libraries, frameworks, and custom code modules. This analysis provides a clear view of the application’s attack surface and enables the identification of potential vulnerabilities associated with specific code components.

2. Contextual understanding of software architecture

By analyzing the application’s design, interactions between components, and network infrastructure, security teams can gain insights into the potential vulnerabilities that need to be tested. This understanding allows for more targeted and effective penetration testing efforts.

3. Material code change detection

One of the critical aspects of agile penetration testing is the identification of risky material code changes. Through integration with version control systems and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, organizations can monitor code changes for potential security risks. By analyzing code diffs, commit messages, and metadata, security teams can identify changes that may introduce vulnerabilities or impact the application’s security posture.

Automate the workflow, not just the alert

Once the code components, application architecture, and risky material code changes have been identified, organizations can use that context to automatically scope a penetration test. That includes:

• Creating tickets for the pentest team, complete with change diffs, impacted components, and business context.
• Sending Slack messages to notify stakeholders without needing manual triage.
• Generating specific targets like new endpoints, modified APIs, or high-risk flows to test.

This lets security teams move fast and disrupt engineering less, while actually improving the quality and coverage of their pentests.

The outcome: faster, more specific testing

By scoping pentests through actual material code change detection, you spend less time coordinating and more time reducing real risk. Agile penetration testing helps you avoid wasted effort on irrelevant or outdated targets, catch impactful changes as they happen, and keep security testing aligned on business priorities with a shared sense of responsibility. Because this process is automated, it easily scales with your team, regardless of the number of apps, repos, and developers.

Apiiro makes agile pentesting possible

With deep code analysis, material change detection, and governed workflows out of the box, Apiiro helps security teams shift from reactive to adaptive testing, right in step with development.

Learn more in a demo.