As we increasingly move toward an Agile world, the bar is high for IT teams. They are expected to work faster and faster to reduce delivery time and to improve the quality of each product without driving up costs.
This means that both developers and testers are involved in the software development process earlier than before. This is then known as “Shifting Left.”

What is Shift-Left testing?

Shift-Left testing, as the name implies, literally moves testing to the left, meaning that it comes at the very beginning of software development.

Shift left testing involves testing early in the life cycle to detect problems earlier and reduce troubleshooting time and cost. Essentially, the idea is to implement QA earlier in the project.

Shift-left testing versus traditional testing

In traditional testing, much is focused on performing regression testing and performance testing toward the end of the release. In many cases, release deadlines were not met and troubleshooting costs were high. This is because too many errors were discovered late in the life cycle.

Shift-left testing finds bugs early and fixes them. The model accelerates attention to quality from the beginning, and defects caught in this way can be easily fixed at a lower cost than at the end of the cycle.

With Shift-left testing, quality becomes everyone’s job. There is less rework and projects stay true to timelines. This ensures faster time to market and better ROI.

Advantages and disadvantages of Shift-left testing

Shift left testing offers several important advantages.

• It minimizes rework and testing costs
• Make better adjustments through early feedback
• Easier to stick to release schedules and milestones
• Ensures building more consistent, reliable and better products
• A shorter time-to-market, as the QA process is faster than ever
• Ensures faster development teams with more time for innovation
• The opportunity arises to use test automation tools
  There are also some drawbacks to Shift-left testing
• Time and resources wasted (in people waiting for input if poorly manged)
• You must plan and prioritize activities to avoid being overwhelmed
• Organizations will need to invest in retraining employees

Shift Left allows you to save time, testing effort, risk and resources. So an absolute necessity for Agile testing!