What does Shifting Left for testing mean ??

What shifting Left in the Testing/Quality perspective means

- Identifying the needs and dependencies of testing & related activities early in the planning cycle. This means understanding the following :

• Dependencies of testing

  • Within a team

    • Technical activities/experiments

    • Understanding the business requirements and plan accordingly

  • Outside of teams

    • Data that comes from other squads and teams

    • Impact on teams that depend on us for

• A continuous feedback loop to react to changes and feedback

• Automate your tests and ensure the tests are not flaky !!!

  • If there are flaky tests then, the confidence in the system goes down

How to implement the Shift Left process ??

• Understand where you are in the journey

• Make measurable changes

  • See how you can measure progress. It could be

    • Bugs that are caught earlier in the process

    • Issues prevented

    • Coverage of automated tests ==> behaviors tested

    • Confidence a team has with releases

    • How easy is it to integrate feedback

• The least disruptive way is to introduce changes incrementally (this works in most cases). Depending on the context, one may do it with a more big-bang approach

• See what the team is comfortable with and what you are trying to achieve

• The goal is to improve iteratively. It is okay to have a non-perfect start, as long as you improve the process and execution, you are good !!!!