Certified: The ISACA CISA Prepcast

Welcome to The Bare Metal Cyber CISA Prepcast. This series helps you prepare for the exam with focused explanations and practical context.
Modern software development methods like Agile and DevOps are now widespread across organizations, replacing or supplementing traditional models like Waterfall. These approaches emphasize rapid delivery, flexibility in handling evolving requirements, and close collaboration across technical and business teams. However, this increased speed and adaptability requires auditors to reconsider how controls are implemented and validated. Standard audit templates built for phase-based projects often fail to capture the dynamic nature of iterative development. The CISA exam now regularly includes questions involving Agile and DevOps, so candidates must understand how audit responsibilities shift in fast-paced development pipelines, and how assurance can still be maintained even when delivery cycles are measured in days instead of months.
Agile development operates on core principles that prioritize working software, adaptive planning, and constant stakeholder interaction. Rather than locking in requirements at the beginning, Agile teams work in short development cycles called sprints, each delivering a usable increment of functionality. Teams are cross-functional, meaning developers, testers, product owners, and often security specialists work together continuously. Requirements evolve through close communication with users, rather than being handed off as rigid documents. This means audit evidence must focus on ongoing control effectiveness instead of static signoffs. For CISA candidates, it is important to understand that Agile doesn't eliminate the need for control—it simply spreads it throughout the lifecycle, making it more fluid and dependent on repeatable team practices and artifacts.
Agile environments generate a variety of artifacts and events that can serve as useful audit entry points. The product backlog is a living document containing prioritized user stories and tasks that define what features will be delivered and when. Sprint planning sessions define the goals of each sprint, while sprint retrospectives offer insight into process improvements and team discipline. User stories express requirements from an end-user point of view and include acceptance criteria, which can be used to verify control alignment. Burndown charts visualize how much work remains in a sprint, helping auditors monitor progress and identify schedule risks. For CISA candidates, it is essential to understand how to interpret Agile documentation and to recognize where to find audit-relevant evidence in a rapidly moving development environment.
Even in Agile settings, control expectations such as access restrictions, change reviews, and testing rigor must still be met—though often in more streamlined or embedded forms. Agile teams must integrate security, quality assurance, and risk management into daily routines and sprint-level reviews. Sprint reviews can be used as informal audit checkpoints, while user story acceptance criteria help ensure that security and compliance controls are built directly into features. Documentation may be lightweight, but it must be versioned, traceable, and stored in a manner that supports future audit validation. Auditors must evaluate whether essential control activities—like code reviews, testing, and approvals—are consistently integrated into the sprint cycle, rather than being left for a final stage. The CISA exam may include questions about whether Agile practices provide adequate assurance or whether certain controls are being bypassed in the name of speed.
DevOps builds on Agile by further integrating development and operations into a unified, automated delivery pipeline. In a DevOps environment, code is often built, tested, and deployed in an automated sequence, using tools like Jenkins, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-native CI/CD platforms. These tools enable rapid, frequent releases—sometimes dozens per day—but also shift control activities into the realm of automation. For auditors, this means that the tools themselves become the control framework, and configurations, logs, and automated workflows are the audit evidence. DevOps shortens time-to-market but also increases the number of changes and the need for continuous monitoring. CISA candidates must understand that auditing DevOps requires reviewing tool configurations, evaluating audit logs, and assessing whether automated checks are functioning as designed.
Traditional pre-implementation reviews and static control sign-offs often don’t fit into DevOps pipelines, where releases occur rapidly and often without a formal pause. Instead, automated testing, code review approvals, and deployment gates must serve as embedded controls. Segregation of duties can still be achieved if developers cannot push code to production without independent review or if all approvals are logged and enforced by workflow tools. Real-time monitoring becomes essential, as does the ability to roll back changes quickly when failures occur. Auditors must examine whether change automation is auditable, whether alerts are reviewed, and whether unauthorized changes can be detected and reversed. CISA exam questions in this area often test whether an organization is relying too heavily on speed while failing to implement compensating controls to manage the associated risk.
Continuous testing is a foundational element in both Agile and DevOps environments, replacing the traditional model where all testing is confined to a single phase. In modern pipelines, automated unit, integration, and security tests are run as soon as code is committed, helping teams catch errors and vulnerabilities early. Manual testing is still used, but it is focused more on exploratory efforts and complex edge cases. Tools track test coverage, maintain defect logs, and provide dashboards that show real-time results. These outputs become critical audit evidence, allowing auditors to verify whether controls are working without interrupting the delivery process. CISA candidates should understand how to assess the reliability of test suites, how test failures are handled, and whether automated testing truly supports quality and control assurance.
Risk management in Agile and DevOps must keep pace with the speed of delivery, and while individual changes may be smaller, the volume and frequency of those changes introduce new risks. Frequent releases reduce the scope of failure but increase the attack surface, especially if security reviews are not integrated into each iteration. Automated dashboards and real-time alerts help surface emerging risks quickly, but these must be actively monitored and acted upon. Risk acceptance decisions must still be documented, even if they occur within a sprint or during backlog grooming. For auditors, the challenge is ensuring that risk ownership is clear, that risk tracking is ongoing, and that decisions are documented—even in a culture that favors speed. On the CISA exam, candidates may encounter scenarios where risk visibility is compromised by overly agile or automated processes.
Auditing Agile and DevOps environments requires a shift in approach, focusing less on traditional documents and more on systems, behaviors, and tooling outputs. Auditors should engage early by observing sprint planning sessions, reviewing backlog items for control relevance, or participating in retrospectives to assess team discipline. Sampling user stories, reviewing pull requests, analyzing deployment logs, and verifying access control entries are all part of modern audit practice. The key question is not “Was this document signed?” but “Was this feature reviewed, tested, approved, and deployed securely using traceable, enforceable systems?” For CISA candidates, this means learning how to audit with flexibility, while still ensuring that core control objectives are met.
To prepare for the CISA exam and work effectively in modern IT environments, you must understand how Agile and DevOps change where and how audit fits. You need to know when these methods are appropriate, how to interpret automated workflows and lightweight documentation, and how to identify whether essential controls are functioning within short delivery cycles. The focus is no longer on reviewing everything after the fact—it’s on ensuring that the right controls are baked into the process from the beginning. Modern SDLCs do not remove the need for audit—they simply redefine it. Auditors who adapt to this mindset can provide meaningful assurance without becoming bottlenecks. Whether reviewing a weekly sprint or a daily deployment, your role is to help teams move fast—but with control, clarity, and accountability.
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