Why do your DevOps teams need to “shift left”?

Testing has been an integral part of the software development process since the start. A more software-defined approach to product development has resulted in accelerated product development. To match this accelerated delivery speed with higher product quality an alternative approach to traditional testing was needed. This is where TestOps stepped in. Most organizations prefer automated and continuous testing for quick and continuous feedback to ensure bug-free products. This, in turn, reduces the complexities involved in development processes and accelerates software delivery. In other words, TestOps is a more evolved version of testing in which Development, Testing, and Ops teams collaborate to accelerate software delivery.

Earlier, Test teams used to enter the process at a much later stage, once the Dev teams were done with the development. But now, Test teams work closely with the Development and Ops teams and have their say at earlier stages of product development too. Shift left is an important practice in TestOps that has gained widespread popularity in recent times. If you are looking to increase the efficiency of your TestOps processes, then this blog might interest you. To begin, we will look at what could be some of the causes of software failure and then dive deeper into the shift left approach.

Causes Of Software Failure

The causes of failures may include inappropriate frameworks, inadequacies in algorithms, database-related issues, incorrect synchronization, erroneous resource estimations, queries demanding too much data and issues with images and service calls, among others. If any of these shortcomings are observed in the earlier stages, it is obvious that problems will persist in the stages that follow due to the inter-dependencies. While most users blame developers for software failure and bugs, what they often forget is, it could be one of these parameters going haywire instead.

What Is Shift Left All About?

A simple answer to this question is — shift left is all about reducing failures in the software development process. But how do we do that? I will try answering that question here. To begin with, DevOps expects continuous application delivery at lightning speeds and shift left refers to prevention against bugs and failures at the earliest to meet these expectations. You must have heard the proverb, “Prevention is better than cure” and shifting left does exactly this! It tests your software and applications at every stage and gets rid of bugs and errors at much earlier stages i.e. before the errors become disasters. In layman’s terms, you synchronize testing at every stage of the DevOps lifecycle. Thus, with this approach, testing becomes an integral part of the whole development lifecycle.

But, Does It Affect The Speed Of Application Delivery?

What we are doing in shift left is — we are picking up testing that used to be a separate process and placing it before every process of the development lifecycle. So, Test teams will have their …read more