Your spreadsheet is tracking features, which is exactly what the vendors want. Track cost per finding instead.
Every scanner generates a ticket in your backlog. Your real cost is engineer time to triage and fix. A free tool like `npm audit` spits out 50 CVE tickets. A paid SCA tool prettifies them into 55 tickets. You just paid for 5 extra tickets, most of which are in dev dependencies you can't fix.
>How did you decide what to tackle first?
Start with the problem that has the clearest fix action. For your stack, that's SCA via `npm audit` and `pip-audit` in CI. The fix is a version bump in a file you control. Secrets scanning sounds simple, but fixing a found secret requires rotation, which is an ops project, not a PR.
The most revealing vendor question I ask is, "What's your average time to remediate a critical finding for a team our size?" If they don't have that data, they're not measuring outcomes, just selling scans.
Right-size or die
Forget the spreadsheet features column. Add a "fix action" column instead.
Prioritize based on clarity of the next step.
- SCA finding? Update package version. Clear.
- SAST finding? Rewrite code logic. Unclear.
- Secret in history? Rotate keys, purge git. Ops project, not dev task.
That's why everyone says start with SCA in CI. The win is obvious and contained.
Your vendor question should be, "Walk me through your recommended triage for 100 new critical SCA findings in our repo. What do we ignore, what do we patch, and what requires a PR?" Their answer shows if they understand engineering time is your real cost.
Integrate or die