According to a report by the Consortium for Information and Software Quality, the subpar quality of software in 2020 resulted in an estimated loss of $2.08 trillion for American enterprises. With this in mind, the software testing services market is expected to grow to $70 billion by 2030. In light of this, companies are increasingly turning to shift-left testing as a means of ensuring the quality of their software.
Shift-left testing is an approach that encourages companies to “test early, test often.” In this article, we will discuss the benefits and drawbacks of this approach, and explore its principles and strategies.
The concept of shift-left testing was first introduced in an article by Larry Smith in a 2001 issue of the US-based Dr. Dobb’s Journal. The idea behind shift-left testing is to move testing activities upstream in the development pipeline. By verifying the code at an earlier stage, companies can detect and fix any errors before they become more costly to fix later on.
Shift-left testing doesn’t mean that QA-related activities are absent in the final stretch. Instead, it encourages their involvement across all steps of the workflow. According to experts, there are four types of shift-left testing: traditional, incremental, Agile/DevOps, and model-based strategies.
The benefits of shift-left testing include early-stage testing, enhanced collaboration, fully-fledged automation, and continuous testing. By starting testing at the outset of the SDLC, the prospect of finding and handling possible obstacles and hindrances before the rollout date increases. Additionally, strong collaboration between programmers, testers, designers, project managers, business analysts, and product owners allows for optimized resource allocation and task estimations. Automation reduces the occurrence of human error, test coverage reasonably expands, and your specialists can concentrate on more engaging tasks. Meanwhile, continuous testing logically means that it’s not a separate phase but an ongoing process that occurs continuously as new code is integrated into the codebase and deployed to production.
To reap the benefits of shift-left testing, companies should integrate validation into the development, map out strategies in advance, revise their corporate structure, invest in tooling and infrastructure, and standardize their procedures to improve the consistency of environments. Development and operations experts should work in tandem rather than in silos, and your developers should have access to tools and dashboards that explain the production, allowing them to detect and troubleshoot issues at every milestone of software creation.
By embracing the shift-left approach in testing, companies can benefit from faster feedback loops, greater agility, and increased collaboration. Although the adoption of this mindset requires investments in people, processes, and technology, the efforts for joining the shift-left movement and establishing a culture of quality and continuous improvement will ultimately pay back.
