Importance of Shift Left Testing

1. A Rise in Automation: Automation is essential to shift-left testing because it makes it possible to run tests quickly in the early phases of development. Quick feedback on code changes can be obtained by integrating automated tests into the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.
2. Culture of Testing Has Altered: Shift-left testing encourages a change in mindset so that testing is viewed as an essential component of the whole development process rather than as a distinct and isolated stage. This shift in culture promotes a quality assurance and continuous testing approach.
3. Enhanced Cooperation: The development and testing teams should work together from the beginning when using shift-left testing. Better communication and teamwork are the results of this collaboration, which helps to establish a shared understanding of requirements, design and testing procedures.
4. Improved Handling of Risk: Risk management can be enhanced by recognizing and addressing possible risks early in the development process. By being proactive, risks are reduced before they have an adverse effect on the project’s timeline or the quality of the final result.
5. Early Defect Identification: Testing can be done at an earlier stage of development, when problems and faults are easier to find and address and can be fixed more quickly and easily.

Shift Left Testing, as the name suggests, is a methodology or an approach that came to be tested earlier in the development process. It mainly focuses on including or involving testers almost in all essential and critical stages of the program. Its main goal is to improve quality by shifting tasks to the left as early as possible in the lifecycle. Rather than dealing with every bug or defect and critical issue post-development, the shift left focuses on preventing defects and reducing risks.

By preventing defects, it also encourages the use of BDD (Behavior Driven Development) and TDD (Test Driven Development). It also supports and encourages the testing team to team up and collaborate with all stakeholders early in the software development process. In the early software development life cycle, testing takes place at the end-of-life cycle. So, it became more difficult and expensive to fix defects that were found later in the development process. But with shift-left testing, defects are found earlier in the development process which makes it easy and less expensive to fix them. So, it is important to get started with a shift-left approach to avoid expensive mistakes.