Picture this:

Your business is approaching the final stages of a critical software project, and with looming deadlines, your hardworking development team is in a race against the clock. However, as the project nears completion, a common issue arises. That is – comprehensive testing has been neglected and postponed until the last minute. 

This often leads to serious problems, like important errors and issues showing up right before the project is ready to launch. 

The result? Frustration, budget overruns, and missed deadlines.  

I bet you and your team would prefer to avoid facing such challenging situations. 

This is where the concept of “shift-left testing” and “shift-right testing” comes into play as a solution to this age-old problem. 

In this blog, I’ll help you understand the testing concepts, their significance for your business, and ways to implement them in your development process.  

Keep reading for the bonus element! 

What is Shift-Left Testing? 

Fig -1.0 

As mentioned in the above diagram, the core idea of shift-left testing is to start testing as early as possible, focusing on preventing issues rather than just finding them.  

It involves – running quick, test automation at important stages of software development to catch and address bugs and potential problems proactively. 

Such an approach boosts software quality and cuts down on the time spent dealing with issues that tend to grow bigger as development progresses. Thus, generating a more thorough testing approach throughout the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This leads to a stronger and more dependable final product. 

Well, let’s understand its significance closely in the next section. 

Benefits of Shift-Left Testing 

Here are the top 6 benefits of shift-left testing by which you can redefine your software journey: 

• Involves Early Bug Detection: It will help you find and fix more bugs in the early stages, enhancing the quality of your product. 
• Reduces Cost and Time: It reduces project production time and allows you to save money and time. 
• Improves Testing: Improving your testing approach across the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) increases efficiency. 
• Allows Wider Test Coverage: It allows more team members to participate in testing early and frequently. Thus, expanding your test coverage. 
• Introduces Early Testing: Introducing testing in the project’s early stages sets the foundation for success. 
• Generates Delightful Customers: It will help you to meet project deadlines leaving customers satisfied and delighted. 

Now that you are well equipped with the basics of this approach, let me help you to implement it to experience effortless defect management. 

How to Implement Shift-Left Testing? 

 To implement shift-left Testing effectively in your software development process, consider the following steps: 

• Begin testing as early as possible in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to catch and address issues. 
• Encourage developers to participate actively in testing activities, such as – writing unit test cases and using Linter Tests to maintain code quality. 
• Ensure that testers are involved in feature understanding meetings to create test cases early. 
• Utilize automated testing to streamline the testing process and achieve rigorous tests with each new feature. 
• Make testing a collaborative effort by involving all team members related to software development. 

When talking about implementing this testing, you need to be aware of various sets of approaches. Let me break them down for you in a minute further. 

Different Approaches of Shift-Left Testing  

Here are the 2 sets of approaches: 

• Test-driven development (TDD) – is a software testing and development process that relies on converting software requirements into test cases before fully developing the software. It tracks all software development by repeatedly testing the software against these test cases. This approach involves writing test cases first, followed by writing code for the required feature, leading to immediate code validation. It also introduces testing alongside code writing. 
• Behavior Driven Development (BDD) – this can accelerate the shift-left movement. The BDD approach defines a common design language (Gherkin Language) that can be understood by all stakeholders, such as product owners, testing engineers, and developers. It involves all stakeholders working simultaneously on the same feature which will accelerate the team’s agility. 

It enhances cross-team collaboration and improves the understanding of features. This results in timely feature deliveries. 

So, using TDD or BDD ensures that features are built correctly from the start, promoting the shift-left testing process. 

Note: Sometimes, despite planning things ahead and starting to detect bugs, we still might miss out on other factors that may influence the entire development process. To tackle this, another approach must be used. It’s called “shift-right testing”. 

Onwards to knowing it! 

What is Shift-Right Testing? 

Shift-Right Testing starts as the post-production testing, uncovering unexpected scenarios that may not have been detected within the development environment. This process helps identify the risks specific to the production environment for any given project. 

Referring back to Fig -1.0, shift-right testing is exactly the opposite of shift-left testing. It moves testing to the right side of the timeline. The goal here is to identify the expected production behavior of that application under actual user counts. Additionally, it tests the performance of applications under actual load in production. 

With this approach, findings are managed in a continuous loop. The feedback is provided by the development, quality assurance, and operations teams.  

Therefore, shift-right testing has become a vital part of DevOps, enabling SDLC to:  

• Deliver key findings 
• Improve productivity 
• Enhance end-user experience 
• Boost performance 

If you want to know what advantages it brings to your business, I’ve got you covered further. 

Benefits of Shift-Right Testing 

Here are the top 6 benefits of shift-right testing: 

• Improves Product Quality: You can easily understand user preferences to enhance your product’s quality. 
• Enhances Future Development: Feedback loops make your application better with each iteration. 
• Reduces Delivery Risk: It lowers the risks in continuous delivery processes and increases your overall efficiency. 
• Fosters Collaboration: Encourage collaboration among developers, QA testers, user acceptance teams, and customers. 
• Automates Testing: Expand your automation options and bring more smiles to your customers’ faces.  
• Reduces Workload: Managing features early reduces the pressure on your team.  

By now if you’re intrigued, read on to learn how to put this approach into action. 

How to Implement Shift-Right Testing? 

To implement shift-right testing, consider the following steps: 

• After releasing the software, testing in the production environment is introduced. 
• Then, the findings are shared among the team through a feedback loop. 
• The testing is carried out in a real-world setting, considering actual users and their experiences. 
• Various aspects are examined, including – user count, API response time under load, user experience, and functional tests. 
• Bugs are identified from the test, then are collected, and discussed within the team. 
• It is to be noted that – some clients even route live traffic from their production app to a staging environment for testing before deploying it in production. 

Shift-Right Testing focuses on the production environment. It usually involves choosing stable and productive testing scenarios for better performance.  

Let’s explore some of them! 

Different Approaches to Shift-Right Testing 

These are the different approaches: 

• A/B Testing (Split Testing) – It’s a method for comparing two versions of a webpage or app to see which one works better.
• Blue-Green Deployment – This approach reduces software downtime, simplifies rolling back changes, and prevents service interruptions for critical applications. It involves running two identical environments: one with the current version (blue) and the other with the new version (green). Shift-right testing helps choose the best version for these scenarios.

For these scenarios, shift-right testing helps to judge the most optimal version of an application. 

On the other hand, tests under the shift-right principle, such as – canary tests and dark launches, provide excellent scope for automation.  

• Canary Testing – means testing new software or features with real users in a live environment.
• Dark Launching – involves releasing features to a subset of users, observing their response, and updating features accordingly.

These help automate feature releases, keep teams updated on software performance, and promote optimal use of time and effort. 

As we explored the specifics of both tests in detail, let’s examine the differences between them next. 

Difference between Shift-Left and Shift-Right Testing  

So, the choice between shift-left and shift-right testing depends on your project requirements. Adopting both approaches can offer a holistic testing strategy that enhances software quality, reduces costs, and ultimately delights the end users.  

Also, to deliver the best possible software product, join hands with Nitor Infotech for cutting-edge tech solutions.