Code Quality Is Being Sacrificed for Speed - and That Includes Security

A recent DevOps.com article spotlighted a familiar tension in modern software development: the ongoing trade-off between speed and code quality. The discussion focused largely on testing, performance, and maintainability, with the topic of security being unsurprisingly absent.

What Is Code Quality?

Code quality refers to how well software code adheres to best practices that ensure it is readable, maintainable, and reliable. Good quality code is cleanly structured, efficient, easy to test, and simple to debug or enhance. While “quality” might seem subjective, seasoned developers recognize high-quality code by its ability to perform its intended function without introducing unnecessary complexity or risk.

High code quality leads to faster development cycles, fewer bugs, reduced tech debt, and ultimately more reliable and robust applications. But the impact goes further: clean code makes teams more productive, facilitates onboarding, and reduces the burden on QA. It prevents brittle systems that break under pressure and ensures the codebase remains a strategic asset instead of a liability.

The benefits and liabilities of code security, however, are the same. While security isn’t a developer metric for success - velocity is - it’s not optional, and the responsibility of addressing security problems in code does ultimately fall to developers. It also, like issues in testing and performance, ends up back in their court when it’s deemed not good enough, slowing down the process.

Security is inherently a component of code quality and is also being sacrificed at the altar of velocity. So why, then, is it so often left out of the conversation until it’s too late?

When Security Slows You Down, It Gets Sidelined

Here’s the hard truth: current security tools aren’t just ineffective, they’re part of the problem.

They create friction:

• Post-commit scans lead to failed builds and rework cycles.
• Delayed feedback results in vulnerabilities being discovered too late to fix easily.
• Alert fatigue desensitizes teams, turning real risks into background noise.

So security is skipped, deferred, and/or labeled as someone else’s problem; but this isn’t just a missed step - it’s a compounding liability. Security vulnerabilities accumulate as security debt, quietly undermining code quality and exposing businesses to breaches and compliance risks.

Most development teams don’t ignore security because they don’t care - it’s because today’s security tools weren’t built for their pace. The traditional landscape of code security tooling is filled with after-the-fact solutions: static analysis tools bolted onto CI/CD pipelines, dashboards that flood developers with alerts after they commit, or compliance platforms that turn audits into quarterly fire drills. These are retrofits, not native solutions. They’re clunky attempts to force-fit security into workflows that were never built to accommodate them.

This means that, in the sprint to ship features, security becomes an afterthought; or worse, a bottleneck to bypass. This ultimately leads to, at best, a slowdown in the SDLC as vulnerabilities are detected, prioritized, and resolved or, at worst, a potentially substantial security incident.

Security Is Code Quality

Secure code is high-quality code. It’s resilient, reliable, and future-proof. When development teams are equipped to write secure code from the outset, the overall integrity of the software improves.

But to do that, security must move left, not as an additional burden, but as an enabler. The solution isn’t to ask developers to work slower. It’s to empower them to work smarter.

That’s why forward-thinking teams are turning to developer-first security solutions that operate directly inside the IDE. Rather than flagging issues after code is committed, these tools detect and remediate vulnerabilities as code is being written. Even better, they provide just-in-time training, transforming every detection into an opportunity to upskill. The result is fewer vulnerabilities, faster remediations, and drastically reduced security debt. Most importantly, it means security no longer competes with speed but instead becomes part of it.

Let’s Stop Treating Security Like a Gate

Security doesn’t need to be the “code cop” slapping wrists after mistakes are made. It can be the coach, training developers in real time to prevent those mistakes in the first place.

So the next time we talk about “software quality being sacrificed for speed,” let’s not forget that security is quality. And it’s time our tools and our mindset reflect that.