Using the Shift Left Strategy in Software Testing

With each new day, the demand for quality software products is increasing, and project teams have to experiment and apply new approaches to web product development.

The so-called Shift Left Strategy is ideal for such a situation because even in companies that practice the agile methodology, testers are involved in the development process at the final stage of working with the product.

shift left testing

Features of the Shift Left Strategy

A basic feature of this strategy is to shift the testing processes “to the left” and start testing software components immediately after their creation or implementation, rather than after the end of the global software build process in a holistic state.

In other words, developers will be able to perform more tests before sending entire modules inside the version control system. The responsibility for software quality with the Shift Left strategy falls equally on both testers and programmers.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of the Shift Left Strategy?

• Finding bugs and defect early in the development lifecycle;
• Optimization of financial and time costs for software testing service;
• The final version of the software contains a minimum number of errors, as it undergoes multiple testing of individual product components;
• In the end, the support department receives a high-quality code base which operations will run without significant technical issues;
• A high level of customer satisfaction, since the software code is as stable as possible and executed within the allocated budget.

The main disadvantage of this strategy is that for an effective transition to Shift Left testing, there must first be a significant change in the company’s work culture, which requires a maximum expenditure of collective effort. Often software testing outsourcing companies are aimed at the classic ways of web product development and testing.

To be able to actively use the Shift Left strategy requires a radical change in methods of work, setting up new processes, obtaining special skills, using certain tools, and the like. Also, you should not forget about effective managerial coordination, through which the implementation of certain works will be supervised.

But in the end, the final result is worth the maximum effort. QA specialists will have to share their immediate responsibilities with developers and instruct them to perform special types of tests. On project teams that regularly use the Shift Left strategy, testers become a kind of “mentor” and teach programmers how to write technically correct code, avoid common bugs, and conduct independent unit testing. Such a distribution of personal responsibility for the final software testing leads to the maximum level of quality achieved.