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."

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.

Check out: Guide to Cross-Platform Mobile Test Automation Using Appium

Key elements 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.
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

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.

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:

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.
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.

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

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.

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.

Also check: Uncovering a Few Popular Android Test Automation Frameworks

3. Agile/DevOps testing

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.

Please read: How Does Continuous Testing Accelerate DevOps?

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

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.

Test your mobile apps on real devices in 50+ locations worldwide. Know more.

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.

Also read: Aligning Your Testing Approach with Your Product's Maturity

How to implement shift-left testing approach?

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

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.

• 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. 

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FAQs

Q1. What is a shift right testing approach?

Ans: A shift right test approach initiates testing from the right, which is post-production. This helps teams to test a completely built and functioning app to ensure good performance and usability traits. 

Q2. What is the role of behavioral driven development and test-driven development in shift-left testing?

Ans: The shift-left approach encourages testers to adopt BDD and TDD, which helps in preventing defect induction into the software.

Q3. What is the importance of specifying quality standards in shift-left testing?

Ans: QAs and QA managers should determine the level of quality, performance, and operational success that is expected from the code such that developers running the tests are aware of which bugs to look up for. They require a clear idea of the non-negotiable elements and the issues that can be forwarded to QAs. Proper clarity on software quality standards further helps tests to apply the appropriate technique to identify the bugs in their own code.