What are the best strategies for testing in a shift-throughout environment?

Tooling, cross team collaboration and empowering the teams to follow the process of shifting left are at the core of successful agile testing workflow. Without any of these pillars you cannot succeed and move fast while improving software quality

Adopting shift-left testing encourages early involvement of testing teams in the software development lifecycle, from requirement gathering to design and development phases. By engaging testers early on, potential issues can be identified and addressed before they escalate, leading to faster delivery and higher-quality software.

Testing in a shift-throughout environment demands adaptability. Prioritize automation for swift verification of changes. Implement CI/CD pipelines for seamless integration and deployment. Break down the system into microservices for targeted testing. Focus on risk-based testing and regression testing, while incorporating exploratory testing for unforeseen issues. Maintain robust monitoring and logging for real-time issue detection. Foster collaboration among teams and establish feedback loops for continuous improvement.

- **Immediate Feedback Loop**: TDD fosters an immediate feedback loop between developers and QA teams by requiring tests to be written before code implementation. This ensures that any changes or additions to the codebase are immediately validated against specified requirements. - **Continuous Regression Prevention**: By maintaining a suite of automated tests that run after each code change, TDD helps QA teams prevent regressions. This proactive approach to testing ensures that existing functionalities remain intact even as requirements evolve.

Implement test-driven development (TDD) by writing tests before writing code, ensuring that the code meets the desired functionality, and continuously running tests to verify its accuracy and reliability throughout the development process.

Implement continuous testing by integrating automated tests into the development process, ensuring that tests are executed regularly and automatically whenever changes are made to the codebase, enabling rapid feedback and early detection of issues.

Discovery is important in every profession, but for testers, this method allows us to take much less risk in some vital tests. It allows you to look ahead regularly before testing and determine where to start. It also gives us the opportunity to talk to the product owner and expand the test requirements and increase our performance.

- **Scalable Infrastructure**: Cloud-based testing platforms offer scalability, allowing QA teams to easily adjust resources based on changing testing needs, ensuring sufficient capacity to handle varying workloads. - **Diverse Testing Environments**: Cloud-based testing provides access to a wide range of testing environments, devices, and configurations, enabling comprehensive testing across different platforms, browsers, and devices to ensure thorough coverage.

Utilize cloud-based testing solutions to perform testing activities such as functional testing, performance testing, and compatibility testing in a scalable, efficient, and cost-effective manner, leveraging the flexibility and resources of cloud computing infrastructure.

- **Agile Methodologies Adoption**: Embrace agile testing methodologies like Scrum or Kanban, fostering flexibility and collaboration to quickly adapt test plans to changing requirements. - **Test Automation Implementation**: Prioritize test automation to accelerate testing cycles, increase coverage, and provide fast feedback on the impact of new features or modifications. - **Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD)**: Implement CI/CD pipelines to automate integration, testing, and deployment processes, enabling rapid feedback loops and early defect detection.

Both Shift left and shift right are essential strategies for Quality Assurance. Adapting continuous testing and continuous monitoring capabilities improve the overall quality of the product.