uThe OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS) Project provides a basis for testing web application technical security controls.
uThe purpose for the ASVS is providing a standard of communication between software vendors and customers. The customer can ask 'How secure are you,' the vendor can answer 'THIS secure,' and everyone is on the same page.
uBy nature, the ASVS is platform independent and free of technical detail. It is simply a listing of security controls, subcategorized by topic and ordered by relative difficulty to implement. This lends itself tremendously well to supporting the development of an application security platform for any software - not just for communication with tool vendors.
uUse as a metric - Provide application developers and application owners with a yardstick with which to assess the degree of trust that can be placed in their Web applications,
uUse as guidance - Provide guidance to security control developers as to what to build into security controls in order to satisfy application security requirements, and
uUse during procurement - Provide a basis for specifying application security verification requirements in contracts.