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?
- 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.
- The shift Left approach
provides, high importance to Testing with which
the roles and responsibilities of the testers increase immensely.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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