Shifting Left vs. Shifting Right Testing
The evolution of the internet and apps over the last 20 years has made all businesses and consumers reliant on the quality of software applications. A company's reputation, hard won over many years, can be destroyed by one catastrophic event. Trust is everything in business, so this article will cover a practical approach to maintaining customer trust by having a well-defined and executed shift left and shift right testing approach.
In 2023, the software development market will be worth £334.86 billion, projected to reach $1 trillion by 2030. The challenge to achieving this growth prediction is ensuring that software products and services work as designed with the evolution of current and future systems. To accomplish this challenge, you can opt for one of two testing techniques, Shift Left and/or Shift Right. But, the reality is that good practice will dictate you execute both approaches.
In this blog, we will go over both approaches to ensure that the end result is quality software that is performant for your customers. Let's start by reviewing the key elements of Shift Left and Shift Right testing.
Shift Left Testing
The core objective of Shift Left testing is to identify and fix software issues earlier in the development lifecycle. However, it is an easy statement but requires project commitment to succeed. The technique is ideally suited to an Agile development process, and the following points highlight the challenges:
Test Development - Whether the team approach is collaborative or orthogonal testing, commitment to completing the functional testing of defined requirements as early in the Sprint as possible can provide an ever-growing automation suite and bug-free delivery provides tested features moving towards release.
Test Data - All teams need help getting relevant test data that can be used as code/design moves through environments. A test data strategy should be implemented, particularly across integrations.
End-to-End Testing - As a group of functional elements become available and can be successfully tested, particularly with confirmation by a positive regression suite, a release candidate can be ready to move to Production.
Non-Functional Testing- As the internet and mobile applications have become ubiquitous, all non-functional requirements have grown in importance, and release candidates should not be considered production ready until performance tests of all integrations and UX elements are successful.
Transition to Shift Right - Although the functionality delivered may not be the complete solution, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) will be reached at some stage. Once that is the case, testing must continue with the Shift Left Approach whilst also embracing a Shift Right strategy.
Shift Right Testing
Shift-Right testing is required once a version of software is added and deployed to Production. This testing provides you with real-time users' feedback and their experiences while running the software. In addition, shift-right testing has additional benefits. A selection of them is listed below. Additionally, look into the way it was implemented.
Implementing the Shift-Right Testing Technique
Teams can use monitoring and analytics tools to effectively implement Shift Right strategies to collect and analyse system data.
The gathering of insights and validation of the product's usability and functionality are greatly facilitated by user feedback and beta testing.
By adopting agile and iterative development practices, teams can continuously refine the product by incorporating user feedback.
Advantages of the Shift-Right Testing
The core objective of a Shift Right Test Strategy is to incorporate the performance and experiences of the application into a continuous improvement model. Thus such testing is essential for any DevOps provision or active Customer feedback loops. The following elements should be considered.
Cloud Applications - Vendors expect applications to be of a high quality so that cloud features such as auto-scaling can be delivered. Always put monitoring in place to provide this assurance.
Regular Patches or Upgrades - Best practice is to always test a set of patches or upgrades in a non Production environment before promotion to the production environment.
Core Cloud Frameworks - As applications become more diverse using microservices, a clear understanding of the roadmaps of each vendor providing the services is essential to plan within the patches and upgrades cycle.
Controlled loop testing - It is possible to run tests in Production provided the tests provide a complete loop, e.g. using a specific user, credit can, product etc., but ensuring that if the test is to place an order, that transaction is auto reversed within the automation run.
Categorize Critical Tests - Always be able to run a subset of a regression suite to ensure critical functions work.
Multi Variate Testing - Usually called A/B testing, Marketing departments often initiate this and should be treated as an external test as it requires customer interaction. Once the functional mechanism has been tested, the specific variables can be deployed without a code change. However, the results must be analysed, and feedback or modifications to the UX are formally made using a permanent version release.
Conclusion
Best practice would indicate that Shift Left and Shift Right are interdependent as an infinite process loop. As an illustration, the following diagram encapsulates all the above points but is incomplete, as each process element may require refinement.
