SHIFT LEFT TESTING

Speed and Quality Required

Common Quality Compromises

QA and test management have become very complex in the digital world with the numerous platforms, OSs, devices, use cases and variety of network connections and carriers involved. Mobile, web and hybrid apps have to be tested across multiple permutations and combinations. In our experience with both market leaders and emerging innovators, we see organizations come up against several common challenges as they try to ensure quality products and services in mobile, web and IoT.

• Fast changing requirements demand additional features in existing applications
• Interdependencies between features introduce unforseen application errors

• Implicit requirements leading to incorrect assumptions and misinterpretation
• Miscommunication about requirements
• Complex business requirements that are not fully understood

• Developers not understanding requirements fully
• Assuming too much on their own
• Shortcut methods to deliver application in short amount of time

• Incomplete testing against client requirements
• Compressed time windows require tradeoffs
• Quality not meeting the standards

Time to Resolve Bugs/Defects

A recent study titled “The Journal of Defense Software Engineering” by CrossTalk, measured the difference in the time it takes to resolve an issue/defect found at the early and late stages of the software development lifecycle. The study determined that it can take as much as 150x longer to resolve a defect found in production vs. one found at the requirements stage; and 30X longer than one found in design.

With most testing and QA processes not beginning until the coding stage, companies find it much harder to respond, resulting in:

Infostretch and “Shift Left”

At Infostretch, we have extensive experience in helping organizations “Shift Left.” Leveraging proven best practices, tools and frameworks, we optimize testing and QA and embed Shift Left concepts and procedures into the application development lifecycle with the goals of “Prevention” and “Prediction.”

This includes a well-defined and structured defect prevention methodology shared by project implementation teams to identify, analyze and prevent bugs and defects throughout the development lifecycle. Standardizing and automating these processes across the team creates greater predictability in identifying defects and our extensive experience in the field of testing gives us access to a large base of knowledge to prevent potential defects before they happen.

Our approach to Shift Left encompasses the end-to-end software development lifecycle.

Allocation

Infrastructure

Infrastructure should not be overlooked. In many cases, your team will be prepared and available to conduct early testing, but the test environment will not for any number of reasons. This can create big inefficiencies. To resolve this, plan, create and virtualize the services wherever needed.

Consider the following:

Automation is also key

The importance is illustrated in the two diagrams below

In the traditional Agile approach, “Without Infostretch” below, there is a linear process starting with requirements and continuing through design and then development. User stories are defined, sprint planning takes place, sprint execution of a periodic time – let’s say for example a sprint of two weeks is started. This two-week sprint contains two weeks of application development and two weeks of testing in parallel.

In the Shift Left Agile example below labeled “With Infostretch,” the testing and automation teams are involved from the start of the project. So, they fully understand the requirements. Now when development starts, the test and automation can identify the test cases for automation, create the test scripts and also validate these test scripts for automation – all in parallel. Testing is accelerated because only execution of testing scripts needs to take place. As a result, testing cycles can be completed with 1.5 weeks, a 25% reduction.