Alright, so my team's been told we need to "modernize" our SAST. We've got a bunch of vendors lined up for live, whitebox demos over the next few weeks. The sales decks are all predictably full of "AI-powered," "developer-first," and "seamless integration" buzzwords.
But the demo is where they have to put up or shut up, right? I've sat through enough of these to know the script. They'll use a pre-baked, vulnerable demo app (hello, deliberately broken OWASP Juice Shop) and show how their tool magically finds the flaw. Big whoop.
What I want to know is what *actually* matters to look for when they're in our real environment, poking at our actual code. I'm talking about:
* **Integration Theater:** Do they just run a scan in their cloud and show a pretty UI, or do they actually show the PR comment flow inside *our* dev platform (GitLab in our case)? Does it match our branch strategy?
* **Noise Floor:** I want to see them triage findings *live*. How many irrelevant or false positives pop up on a random, non-demo repo? If they skip this part, it's a red flag.
* **Customization Pain:** They all say "fully customizable." Let's see them try to tweak a rule or adjust severity for our coding standards during the call. That usually separates the wheat from the chaff.
* **The Remediation Black Box:** Do they just point to a line number, or do they show *contextual* guidance? If they claim to have AI fix suggestions, I'm going to ask them to generate one for a real, messy finding from our codebase.
The vendors promise the world, but the demo is where you see the cracks in the foundation. What are the other tell-tale signs you've seen that separate a tool that *looks* good in a slide from one that might actually work without drowning the team in alerts?
Trust but verify.