How to get started with Shifting Left Testing?

Shift-Left testing differs from one organization to another. There are many variables like organization size, number of security personnel, current processes, and product risk exposure that will affect how the organization approaches this shift. Listed below are the THREE steps that help get started with Shift-Left testing simply and effectively to reap its complete benefits:

Step 1: Define Clear Roles and Responsibilities

Establishing a clear segmentation of roles is crucial to implementing Shift-Left testing effectively. This involves defining the responsibilities of architects, developers, testers, and operations managers.

Clear communication protocols can minimize testing and debugging time by ensuring that everyone understands their specific roles and the tools they will use throughout the development lifecycle. This foundational step ensures that all team members are aligned and can efficiently collaborate, which is essential for early and effective testing.

Step 2: Incorporate Testing Requirements Early in the Development Process

Shift-Left testing emphasizes the importance of incorporating both functional and non-functional testing requirements early in the software development life cycle (SDLC).

This approach means that testing for performance, security, usability, and other critical aspects begins at the earliest stages. Understanding the application requirements in detail helps teams define the necessary test cases and testing frameworks that will cover the application's architecture, system capacity, potential bottlenecks, and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Early identification of these elements ensures that testing is thorough and that issues are detected long before they can affect later stages.

Step 3: Embrace Test Automation and Continuous Feedback

To make Shift-Left testing successful, automation should be a priority. Implementing automated test scripts allows for continuous testing and immediate feedback during each development iteration. This approach supports a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, where automated tests are triggered with every new code build, ensuring that the codebase is always stable and high-quality.

Moreover, establishing a continuous feedback loop between developers and testers enables rapid identification and resolution of defects, thereby improving code quality and reducing the time to market.

These steps provide a structured way to integrate Shift-Left testing into your development processes, ensuring early detection of issues, fostering collaboration, and maintaining high-quality standards throughout the SDLC.

What changes after you shift to the left?

What are some changes you’re likely to see if your company decides to use Shift-Left testing?

1- Less time is required for Testing Activities

In traditional, non-agile strategies, testers have to wait until developers are finished establishing software features to be able to begin the testing activities. After shifting to the left, you will have less waiting related to testing activities.

2- More Customer Involvement

Many agile approaches state that customer involvement is critical for the success of a software project, particularly when it comes to writing test cases or specifications.

3- Commitment to the Testing Pyramid

The test automation pyramid is a helpful concept in test automation. It helps teams determine how to prioritize between the different types of automated software tests. According to the pyramid, unit tests are advised since they are easy to execute, cost less to set up, and require less effort on the developer’s part.

4- Increases Coverage

If you have more people writing tests more frequently and starting earlier, it will ensure that a larger portion of your application is covered in testing.

5- Prevents Unnecessary Maintenance Tests

One of the most challenging aspects of test automation is tedious test maintenance. When your test suit is riddled with fragile tests, each seemingly small change to the codebase can result in a test failure. As a result, managing the tests becomes a big chore, jeopardizing the entire test automation effort. When you adopt shift-left testing, it’s important to give the test maintenance problem the care it deserves. Since you will naturally have a larger number of tests of many different types.

6- Involve Diverse Team in Running Performance Tests

It’s becoming more normal for everyone in a software company to carry out testing these days. Fortunately, there are tools available today that allow even non-programmers to create extensive tests in previously unimaginable ways.

How Testcrew can help you in shifting your testing left?

Shift left testing provides an effective means to perform testing in parallel with the development process; resulting in providing faster better and higher quality applications, as well as enhancing collaboration between development, operation, and testing teams. With the TestCrew team as TAAS (Testing as a Service), it’s a lot easier to identify and fix the defects in the staging environment itself.

In addition, you can accelerate your Testing Journey with Testcrew and provide your developers an opportunity to resolve high-risk issues before users ever encounter them. Along with shifting left the testing process, our QA team embeds intelligent test automation and continuous testing principles right across the software delivery pipeline.

Empowering the QA teams with such real-time self-healing capabilities using new-age intelligent technologies helps in realizing the true business value and empowers the organizations in providing value to the customer. TestCrew can help you build a good product where UI, API, Load, and Security are not left out to be tested as a different component at the end.