# 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 !!!!