Research Methods Applied to Software Security

Research in software development is important to generate functional, adaptable, eco-friendly, and secure solutions. In the academia, there have been many discussions about the use of more engineering research methods in comparison to the ones used in social sciences (BSR) for behavioral analysis or theory construction. However, the increase of the human-machine interaction has been taking greater relevance. In the present study, we carry out a review of the most used research methods in cybersecurity, validating that the selection of the most used research methods is focused on the construction and evaluation of IT artifact/software. Such can be the case for design science research or controlled experiments.