(Craig Kelly has been working as a software development team leader in an IT company...

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) and fuzz testing require a running application in order to actively probe for vulnerabilities such as injection flaws, authentication bypasses, and improper input handling. These techniques are therefore performed after the application has been built and deployed to a testing environment, categorizing them astest-time checks. Commit-time and build-time checks rely primarily on static analysis and dependency scanning and do not exercise application behavior at runtime. Deploy-time checks focus on configuration validation rather than aggressive attack simulation. Test-time checks are specifically designed to uncover critical and high-severity vulnerabilities by mimicking real-world attack scenarios. Performing DAST and fuzz testing during this stage allows teams to detect exploitable flaws before production release, significantly strengthening application security.

========