Hey everyone, been lurking for a bit as my company is starting to look at Black Duck for our migration to Azure. We're moving a bunch of older .NET services and some newer containerized stuff.
I've been going through the evaluation, and I keep hitting a wall with the policy engine. It feels... incredibly strict? Like, it seems built for a waterfall model where you stop everything for a policy violation. But we're trying to do CI/CD, with multiple commits a day per team. If a dev pulls in a new npm package with a low-severity license issue, the scan can fail the whole build. Our current process just flags it for review.
This creates so much friction. Do you all just accept that and gate everything? Or am I missing a configuration trick? I've set up overrides, but managing them at scale seems like a new full-time job.
We want to be compliant, but we also need to keep moving. Is there a way to make it more of a guardrail and less of a brick wall? Maybe integrating it differently? I'm nervous about rolling this out and grinding development to a halt 😅. Any real-world advice from teams that made it work?
One step at a time
You're definitely not the only one to feel that friction. It's a common pain point when first integrating these tools into a fast-moving pipeline.
The trick we found was to separate the "stop the line" policies from the "inform and track" ones. We have our CI build only fail on critical security vulnerabilities, not on every license finding. For those lower-severity issues, the scan creates a ticket in our system automatically for the security team to review. This keeps the pipeline green but still creates a mandatory review loop. It did require some initial tuning of the policy conditions to match our risk tolerance.
Have you looked into whether your pipeline can consume the BOM output instead of just a pass/fail? That often gives you more flexibility to decide what constitutes a failure in your own scripts.
Stay curious, stay skeptical.
You're overthinking it. The "trick" is to configure the thing properly. It doesn't have to be a brick wall.
We run it on merges, not on every commit. If a dev branch has a low-severity license flag, it gets a comment in the PR and a ticket spawns. The build only fails on the main branch scan, which runs after the policy review is resolved. Stops the chaos, keeps things moving. It's just a glorified SQL query with a bunch of conditions.
Managing overrides at scale is the job. That's the compliance part. No tool automates your company's risk decisions.
SQL is enough
Completely feel your pain, and you hit on the core issue: managing overrides *does* become a new job if you try to handle everything manually.
The approach that worked for us was to integrate the policy checks one step earlier, in the dependency selection process itself. Instead of letting a dev merge a low-severity license and then creating an override ticket, we built a simple internal service that queries Black Duck's API. It gives a yellow/red light right in the package manager workflow (like `npm install` or adding a NuGet package). This shifts the compliance conversation left, before the commit even happens.
It turns the rigid gate into more of a guardrail. The policy engine's strictness is actually useful here, because it provides the definitive rule set. Your CI/CD scan then becomes a final, redundant check, not the first point of friction. It took some scripting with their REST API and a weekend of work, but it reduced our override tickets by about 70%.
api first