All You Need To Know About Shift-Left Testing

In recent years, the demand to deliver quality software products at competitive rates in stipulated time continues to accelerate. To avoid falling behind, more and more companies are now applying shift-left testing into their product development process to accommodate the market demands. Shifting testing practices left and incorporate testing as early as possible is one of the breakthrough solutions that allows software businesses to beat their competition to the market.

Shift-left Testing: What Is It?

Simply put, shift-left testing is an approach of bringing testing earlier into the developer lifecycle while improving quality measures. Unlike the traditional testing method where testing is brought in at the end of the development process, the idea of shift-left testing is to involve the testing from the beginning of the design phase to build an appropriate testing strategy. Finding problems as soon as possible reduces the amount of time spent resolving them and reduces the change of testing becoming a bottleneck to a fast release.

Why Shift-left Testing Matters?

Shift-left testing should matter to you because it emphasizes the test early principle. More and more, companies are finding out that style is simply not conducive to rapid releases. Time is money, after all. Shifting testing practices left and incorporate testing as early as possible allows software businesses to beat their competition to the market.

Benefits of Shift-left Testing

Shift-left Testing has been more reliable and widely adopted because of these following benefits:

• Early detection: Find bugs early and fix them before they become a problem in production
• Cost savings: Time and resources can be quickly used up. Shift-left testing helps reduce that problem and saves you money.
• Reliable testing: Increase your testing reliability by using the shift-left testing procedures
• Fast delivery: Deliver your product to market faster

Challenges of Shift-left Testing

• Planning: Shift-left testing can be difficult to incorporate without an effective plan in place before you begin
• Project Management: Properly prepare and train your project managers to incorporate shift-left testing into their processes
• Quality control: Maintaining excellent quality levels during the training and transition phase
• Developers: Developers can be resistant to testing and should be prepared to add testability to their skillset
• Silos: Reduce the silos in your organization to provide swift feedback to fix problems faster and more efficiently
• Audits: If your organization does not actively participate in regular code audits, make sure this is set up to ensure the new testing procedure is working as intended

“Shift-left Continuous Testing” : Why and How?

While shift-left testing has a myriad of key benefits, the technique alone is not enough. Shift-left testing should be incorporated into continuous testing so that testers can generate more frequent, holistic and more practical tests with the implementation of real functional data.

In other words, by incorporating shift-left testing and continuous testing, bug detection can be done more efficiently in the early stage, resulting in higher quality feedback and faster issue resolution with lesser effort.

If continuous testing incorporates the entirety of the DevOps pipeline, shift-left takes a part of each cycle and sets testing strategies for each task in the cycle. Shift-left testing enhances continuous testing and makes it a stronger weapon against bugs. Moreover, you can apply shift-left testing through BBD (behavior-driven development).

Conclusion

After all, time is money. Keep in mind that when you get the software to market faster, you gain a competitive advantage. Integrating Shift-left testing with Continuous Testing will definitely help you meet the market demands and achieve a better ROI.