The high number of cyber threats poses significant challenges, with impactful software exploits ranging from data theft to ransomware deployment. Unfortunately, past research highlighted limited security expertise within development teams. Collaboration between developers and security experts, therefore, emerges as one of the few workable means to address this gap. In this paper, we explore the complex interplay between developers and security experts within Scrum, one of the most widely adopted frameworks which actively promotes collaboration, to shed light on their working relationship, challenges, and potential avenues for improvement. To this end, we conducted a qualitative interview study with 14 developers and 13 security experts. Our qualitative results reveal three communication patterns and five shared challenges between the groups affecting the develop-security expert collaboration. Top challenges include consistent interaction difficulties and the lack of workable means to balance business and security needs. As a result, we found that three core Scrum values (openness, respect, courage) are missing from this relationship. Based on our results, we propose recommendations for fostering a healthy collaboration between developers and security experts, both within and beyond Scrum.

Solana gained considerable attention as one of the most popular blockchain platforms for deploying decentralized applications. Compared to Ethereum, however, we observe a lack of research on how Solana smart contract developers handle security, what challenges they encounter, and how this affects the overall security of the ecosystem. To address this, we conducted the first comprehensive study on the Solana platform consisting of a 90-minute Solana smart contract code review task with 35 participants followed by interviews with a subset of seven participants. Our study shows, quite alarmingly, that none of the participants could detect all important security vulnerabilities in a code review task and that 83% of the participants are likely to release vulnerable smart contracts. Our study also sheds light on the root causes of developers' challenges with Solana smart contract development, suggesting the need for better security guidance and resources. In spite of these challenges, our automated analysis on currently deployed Solana smart contracts surprisingly suggests that the prevalence of vulnerabilities - especially those pointed out as the most challenging in our developer study - is below 0.3%. We explore the causes of this counter-intuitive resilience and show that frameworks, such as Anchor, are aiding Solana developers in deploying secure contracts.