Create A REST API With JSON Server

 

Shift-Left Development Process

 

What is shift-left?

Shift Left is a practice intended to find and prevent defects early in the software delivery process. The idea is to improve quality by moving tasks to the left as early as the lifecycle. Shift Left testing means testing earlier in the software development process.

“Start Testing activities as early as possible in the development life cycle. Test Early and Often”

How does it differ from our traditional model?

A typical waterfall software development project would have seen testing occur immediately prior to release into production. This meant that when bugs or usability issues were inevitably found, the release would be delayed until these were fixed.

Why Shift Left?

In the traditional software development model, requirements are kept on the left side of the plan, and the delivery and testing requirements are on the right. The problem is that these practices can’t handle changing expectations and requirements, resulting in negative outcomes for the business such as:

• Helps to proactively identify defects in the early stages of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
• Increase efficiency / decrease costs.
• Helps to reduce production defects.
• Helps to shorten long test cycles

Some of the main factors when we practice the Shift Left model in Software Development:

• Improved Design
• Bugs are found and fixed early on 
• Massive time and effort are saved
• Gain a higher-quality product
• Provide higher customer/client satisfaction
• Maintain higher-quality codebase
• Higher possibilities of early automation start

How does help to collaborate with Developers and Testers?

• Since the testers are involved from the initial stage of software development, the testers will have an idea of the outcome that comes from the output.
• Indue developers to code with testability in mind.
• Sharing the test scenarios helps the developer to do the unit testing.
• The developer will have a better idea of what the tester scenarios.
• Open discussion in the beginning stage itself.
• Gives clear clarity of the feature we implement.
• Both Developers and Testers are on the same page regarding the context.
• Shift-Left is all about uncovering as many issues as possible as early as you can in the software development process, so the cost of fixing them is under control and also contribute to improving the quality of the shipped products.
• Asking the right questions to customers, business analysts, and developers.
• Seek clarification and provide feedback.
• Another extremely important factor for the success of the Shift-Left approach is establishing a culture of quality is everyone’s responsibility, including developers, dev-ops engineers, business analysts, production support, business stakeholders, and even managers.

How does shift left helps in Software Testing?

1. The Shift Left approach focuses on involving testers in all and most importantly the critical stages of the program. This enables the testers to divert their focus from defect detection to defect prevention and to drive the business goals of the program.
2. The shift Left approach provides, high importance to Testing with which the roles and responsibilities of the testers increase immensely.
3. With the responsibility being increased for the Testing team, the team just does not focus on ‘Testing the software to identify the bugs’, but proactively works with the team right from the initial stages to plan and build a robust and effective testing strategy by providing a great Test leadership and guidance to the team by focusing on the long-term vision of the product, rather than just taking the responsibility of the testing work.
4. The Shift Left approach gives the opportunity for the Testers to design the tests first, where the tests are completely focused on the customer experience and their expectations which in turn will enable the developers to develop the software based on these tests and hence meet the customer needs.
5. The Shift Left approach just does not end with the Testers alone. Moving to the left and carrying out the testing activities continuously will also allow the Developers to take more ownership of their code and increase their responsibilities on testing.
6. The shift Left approach also encourages Testers to adopt Behavioral driven development BDD and Test-driven development TDD, which helps in preventing the defect’s induction into the software.
7. Shift Left Testing in Agile: Shift Left approach supports forming Agile Scrum Teams which mandatorily include Testers along with the other roles and includes Testers in regular stand-up calls, other interactions, and review meetings which have made the testers have more information related to the program and hence has allowed them to indulge and involve in the detailed analysis of the software and provide rapid feedback which would help in preventing the defects grounded in the software.

The benefit of Shift-Left:

• Early Detection: finding defects early, facilitates remediation before they become a major problem in production.
• Costs savings: improve efficiency in the development teams; helps reduce DIT (Defects Injected Trend)
• Reliability in the tests: better understanding of the business, thus more comprehensive test are designed because of QA involvement from the beginning
• Enhance teamwork: quality is everyone’s responsibility.
• Speed up Delivery: allows testing as early as possible in the development pipeline

Conclusion:

The application consistently tests during each integration with the codebase, and before each deployment to another environment. Just testing each feature with each build in this manner establishes a specific level of quality in the application that will help to ensure an effective production release. It’s simpler to fix a bug if it’s caught before in the process, and having CI build run automated test scripts with each commit on the common codebase will help get bugs early.