Building software that is perfect for consumers is not a cakewalk. It takes ample time, effort, and resources. Especially meeting the budget and time-to-market is often complex in the case of software delivery. The right planning and testing strategies are often the key to resolving this issue. In this agile ecosystem, organizations are thus focusing on moving faster by reducing the length of time for delivery while continuing to improve the quality of each release.

1. Shift-Left Testing - Everything You
Need to Know About
Building software that is perfect for consumers is not a cakewalk. It takes
ample time, effort, and resources. Especially meeting the budget and
time-to-market is often complex in the case of software delivery. The right
planning and testing strategies are often the key to resolving this issue. In this
agile ecosystem, organizations are thus focusing on moving faster by
reducing the length of time for delivery while continuing to improve the quality
of each release. In addition to this, they are faced with challenges in reducing
testing costs. As a result, several organizations are adopting agile approaches
where different testers with various skill sets participate in the testing process
in the early stages. This movement vastly refers to "shifting left."

2. What do we understand by shift-left
testing?
The shift-left approach refers to shifting left in the cycle that allows QA and
testing teams to test earlier. This will enable them to detect bugs earlier,
making them less costly and faster. As this approach helps to reduce overall
costs and improve product quality at the same time, it is beneficial that
organizations adopt appropriate testing approaches to address the economic
downswing.
Types of shift left testing
Shift-left testing is an approach that emphasizes testing early and often in the
software development lifecycle. Key elements of shift-left testing include:
1.​ Early Involvement: Involving testers from the beginning of the project
helps them better understand the requirements and identify potential
issues early.
2.​ Continuous Integration: Regularly integrate code changes and run
automated tests to catch defects early.
3.​ Test Automation: Leveraging automation tools to execute tests
frequently and consistently, ensuring faster feedback loops.
4.​ Collaboration: Promoting collaboration between development, testing,
and operations teams to enhance communication and efficiency.
5.​ Incremental Development: Adopting an incremental approach to
development and testing to allow for continuous improvement and
early defect detection.

3. 6.​ Shift-Left Performance Testing: Incorporating performance testing
early in the SDLC will help locate and address performance issues
before they escalate.
Limitations of shift-left testing
While shift-left testing offers numerous benefits, organizations may face
several challenges in implementing this approach:
1.​ Cultural Resistance: Teams accustomed to traditional testing methods
may resist changes required for shift-left testing.
2.​ Skill Gaps: Team members may need additional training to use new
tools and practices associated with shift-left testing effectively.
3.​ Tool Integration: Integrating various testing tools into the development
pipeline can be complex and time-consuming.
4.​ Resource Allocation: Allocating sufficient resources, including time
and personnel, to focus on early testing efforts can be challenging.
5.​ Maintaining Test Automation: Developing and maintaining a
comprehensive suite of automated tests requires ongoing effort and
expertise.
6.​ Balancing Speed and Quality: It can be difficult to ensure that the
speed of development does not compromise the quality of testing and
vice versa.
Best practices for shit-left testing

4. To maximize the effectiveness of shift-left testing in an Agile environment,
organizations should follow these best practices:
1.​ Early and Continuous Collaboration: Foster a culture of collaboration
among developers, testers, and stakeholders from the project's
inception.
2.​ Adopt Agile Testing Frameworks: Use agile testing frameworks like
BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) and TDD (Test-Driven
Development) to integrate testing into the development process
seamlessly.
3.​ Automate Regression Testing: Implement automated regression tests
to identify defects introduced by recent changes quickly.
4.​ Implement Continuous Feedback Loops: Ensure continuous feedback
from automated tests and manual testing efforts to address any
issues promptly.
5.​ Focus on Incremental Testing: Break down the testing process into
smaller, manageable increments that align with Agile sprints.
6.​ Training and Skill Development: Invest in training and skill
development to ensure team members are proficient with the tools
and practices required for shift-left testing.
7.​ Prioritize Test Coverage: Prioritize achieving high test coverage early
in the development cycle to minimize the risk of defects later on.
These additions will provide a comprehensive understanding of shift-left
testing, addressing its core elements, challenges, and best practices within an
Agile framework.

5. Benefits of shift-left testing
The shift-left testing approach aligns itself with the 'test early' principle. By
deploying shift-left testing approaches and testing early on, businesses are
able to release their products sooner and ace the competition.
Primary benefits of shift-left testing include:
1. Reduced costs
Testing early helps to clarify the specification for teams before developing in
the wrong way. It would reduce entire costs by decreasing investigation time
and fixing it after such a wrong implementation.
2. Improved efficiency
By embracing shift-left testing technologies, enterprises can help increase
testing reliability and accelerate speed-to-market.
3. Competitive advantages
Shift-left testing allows testing and QA teams to begin the tests early on in the
cycle. Hence, performing shift-left testing helps deliver high-quality software
while maintaining cost and time-to-market.
4. Improved quality
With early testing, errors and glitches are identified in the initial stages helping
to fix them earlier and saving efforts and costs for resolving errors in the later
stages.
5. Other benefits of Shift-left testing:

6. The shift-left approach allows developers to quickly test code via continuous
integration (CI) and test automation. This enables teams to mature their SDLC
toward continuous testing and the CI/CD pipeline.
Why TDD For Shift Left Testing?
Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a key enabler of shift-left testing as it
integrates testing early into the software development lifecycle. Here's why
TDD is pivotal for shift-left testing:
1.​ Encourages Early Defect Detection​
By writing test cases before the actual code, TDD ensures that defects
are found and addressed during the initial stages of development,
reducing the cost and complexity of fixing issues later.
2.​ Improves Code Quality​
TDD fosters a disciplined approach to coding, where developers write
only the necessary amount of code to pass the tests. This minimizes
redundancy and enhances code maintainability.
3.​ Supports Continuous Feedback​
With TDD, developers receive immediate feedback from test results,
enabling them to adjust their code promptly to meet specified
requirements.
4.​ Facilitates Collaboration​
TDD bridges the gap between developers, testers, and stakeholders by
clearly defining expectations through test cases upfront.

7. 5.​ Aligns with Agile Practices​
Both TDD and shift-left testing are integral to Agile methodologies,
emphasizing iterative development, early testing, and
customer-focused delivery.
Incorporating TDD into shift-left testing ensures the product is built well from
the very beginning, leading to more reliable software outcomes.
Shift Left vs. Shift Right Testing
Shift Left Testing and Shift Right Testing are complementary approaches in
modern software development, each with unique goals and benefits.
Shift Left Testing
1.​ Focus:​
Detect and fix defects early in the development process.
2.​ When:​
During the design, coding, and integration stages.
3.​ Purpose:​
Prevent defects before they occur by conducting early testing.
4.​ Benefits:
●​ Reduces the cost of bug fixes.
●​ Improves code quality.
●​ Accelerates the development cycle.

8. Shift Right Testing
1.​ Focus:​
Validate software in real-world scenarios after deployment.
2.​ When:​
During staging or in live production environments.
3.​ Purpose:​
Gather insights on system behavior, performance, and user
interactions.
4.​ Benefits:
●​ Enhances user experience through real-time feedback.
●​ Provides data for continuous improvement.
●​ Ensures reliability under real-world conditions.
Key Differences
Feature Shift Left Testing Shift Right Testing
Timing Early in the development cycle Post-deployment or staging
Goal Defect prevention Defect detection
Focus Quality assurance User experience and performance
Tools Unit tests, TDD frameworks Monitoring tools, A/B testing
Both strategies are essential for achieving a robust quality assurance process,
with shift-left focusing on proactive defect prevention and shift-right ensuring
user satisfaction in production.

9. Types of shift-left testing
The primary types of shift-left testing include the following—
1. Traditional shift-left testing
This type of shift-left test emphasizes unit testing and integration testing, like
modern API testing, instead of acceptance and system-level testing. The
focus of QA on the shift-left approach is transforming significantly across
industries today to ensure optimal testing practices.
2. Incremental shift-left testing
When teams attempt to shift from waterfall development to other approaches
that can help break down complex projects, they often conduct smaller tests
more frequently. With the help of incremental testing, the teams can focus on
one small part at a time and measure if it meets the standards.
In several instances, teams might split larger projects into a series of
increments instead of one large project, which makes each increment smaller
with a shorter duration. If each of the increments is delivered to the customer
or operations teams, then incremental shift-left testing will move
developmental testing as well as operational testing to the left. This type of
shift-left testing is commonly leveraged for developing complex systems with
significant hardware components.
3. Agile/DevOps testing

10. Generally, agile testing is executed during the development stage and doesn't
cover operational testing that is done after the system is already up and
running. In many scenarios, enterprises are moving towards the approach of
shift-left testing in Agile/DevOps shift-left testing, where tests are performed
earlier in the development cycle.
Why are all organizations not adopting
shift-left testing?
Some of the key reasons why shift-left testing is not prevalent today include
the following—
● Lack of leadership support and alignment
It is often believed that security bugs can significantly cost organizations
when they make it to production. Despite this, organizations are often not
adopting a shift-left approach due to the lack of alignment with leadership and
current processes.
● Lack of testing resources
Workload capacity is one of the primary reasons that organizations are not
seamlessly shifting left. The teams are required to free up resources to adopt
a shift-left testing approach while continuing with the existing test processes.
Often it is believed that shift-left testing has lower test case coverage, which
leads to a lack of adoption of the technique.
● Lack of tester engagement

11. One of the key reasons for not adopting shift-left testing is that product
owners do not engage efficiently in the early phases of design and
development. In the initial project discussions, testers are often not involved
in the early phases of design and development. The teams often don't focus
much on testing before the application hits production.
What do shift-left and continuous testing
implementations offer for the DevOps
strategy?
Continuous testing refers to the practice of deploying automated tests early,
appropriately, and efficiently in the software delivery pipeline.
Though shift-left testing might sound perfect for the testing process before
rolling out the new products, this technique needs to be combined with
several approaches to leverage it optimally. Shift-left testing should be a part
of the continuous testing strategy to allow testers to generate more
comprehensive tests with functional data. The combination of shift-left
continuous testing is the automation of app testing to ensure that it is
leveraged early on and during the product development pipeline.
Deploying this combination means that bug detection is executed earlier,
helping to render quicker feedback related to functional issues with faster
resolutions and lesser effort.
How to implement shift-left testing
approach?

12. Some of the key shift-left testing strategies that enable enterprises to shift-left
with software testing include—
● Demand planning
QA and test analysts in this phase engage with business and operational
stakeholders that help provide a forward view of demand. This helps to plan
and finalize the budget, resourcing, and test strategies ahead of time. Demand
planning constitutes an integral element of the shift-left approach and
provides a starting point for every other activity in the test life cycle.
● Static testing
This is executed in the early stages of the project lifecycle and involves
validating requirements and design. The objective of static testing is to
identify defects in the early stages that can prove to be significantly expensive
in the later phases. Teams should utilize appropriate checklists to verify and
validate requirements and design and leverage defect management tools to
log defects.
● Unified testing strategy
This refers to a high-level strategy for end-to-end testing, from unit testing
through user acceptance testing, operational readiness testing, and
post-deployment testing. This strategy helps cover all phases of quality
control, enabling teams to define clear responsibilities.
● Risk-based analysis

13. Determining the impact and probability of failures in each test scenario is
crucial, and risk-based analysis helps to do that. This approach is mainly used
for functional, non-functional, and regression testing.
After the test cases are established, teams should decide the priority of the
test cases based on the completed analysis. Further, it is essential to discuss
the impact of failure with business analysts or designers and determine the
probability of failure from the development team.
How HeadSpin drives organizations to
shift left and optimize the entire testing
cycle?
The primary requirements for adopting continuous testing in the DevOps
process are continuous automation, continuous integration, and delivery.
HeadSpin's data-driven Platform aligns effectively with the critical requirement
of continuous testing and allows for shifting left in the processes.
The following are three areas that HeadSpin addresses
●​ Integrated testing — HeadSpin allows seamless integration with
multiple load-testing platforms to simplify the testing workflow by
providing client-side monitoring.
●​ Automated testing — HeadSpin can be effectively integrated with
multiple automation frameworks to help automate the tests easily
and existing testing workflows. It can be integrated with Appium,
Selenium, Calabh, TestNG, and many more.

14. ●​ Continuous testing — HeadSpin helps enterprises to perform
continuous tests for functional, performance, and load testing on real
devices across 50+ global locations. The Platform also helps
leverage continuous QoE/QoS assessment framework to gauge
holistic and subjective quality with crucial insights.
HeadSpin's data-driven test automation Platform is extensively leveraged by
organizations across different industries to run end-to-end testing across
multiple apps to ensure optimal user experiences. The advanced AI
capabilities help capture critical performance KPIs and identify issues that
degrade the user experience to help ensure complete customer satisfaction.
With the unique capabilities of the Platform, HeadSpin empowers
development, QA, and product teams to ensure optimal digital experience
throughout the app lifecycle.
Conclusion
Shift-left testing is pivotal to achieving the success of the business and
ensuring that the company achieves a higher quality product in the early
stages. Shifting left helps pay lump sum dividends by allowing teams to save
financial resources, time, and effort in the long run.
This article was originally published on:
https://www.headspin.io/blog/essence-of-shift-left-testing-in-organizations