Shift Left Testing – Software Testing Done Early

Hari Mahesh

Shift left testing strategy relies on user requirements and normally commences with operational testing. For this, testRigor lets you generate instant user-driven test cases. You and your team can evaluate the software planning in the early development phase and align it with the user requirements.

What is Shift Left Testing?

Shift left testing means shifting the testing activities to the beginning of your software development lifecycle to yield high-quality results. This detects the vulnerabilities at an early stage of your development process, thus eliminating the cost in the later stages of software debugging processes.

Why Shift Left?

In a traditional development cycle, testing is typically performed only after the development phase is complete. This means defects are detected late, and fixing them often requires going back to earlier phases (such as design or coding), which is time-consuming and expensive. The later a defect is found in the development process, the more costly it is to fix.

With Shift Left Testing, testing is done throughout the development process, including during requirement gathering, design, and coding stages. By testing earlier, defects are caught sooner, reducing the risk of late-stage defects, lowering costs, and speeding up the release cycle.

Two Main Types of Shift Left Testing

Let us review details about the main two types of Shift Left Testing, what they are, their characteristics, and examples.

Traditional Shift Left Testing

In the traditional form, testing is moved left by starting test design and planning in parallel with the requirement phase. Testers work closely with stakeholders to ensure that testable requirements are defined. Traditional Shift Left testing is the most widely implemented shift left strategy. It uses API testing and concentrates on unit testing as well as integration testing. It works quite similarly to the Waterfall model and uses the V model as an extension of the waterfall. The testing phase is lowered down, and thus, no emphasis is given to the acceptance testing and system testing.

Characteristics:

• Early Involvement of Testers: Testers are involved from the beginning of the project, collaborating with stakeholders during the requirement gathering and design phases.
• Test Planning and Design: Testers start defining test cases and creating test plans as soon as the project requirements are known.
• Static Code Analysis: Techniques like static code analysis can be used before any functional testing, allowing developers to catch security vulnerabilities and code quality issues early.

Example of Traditional Shift Left Testing:

Imagine a banking application project. In Traditional Shift Left, the QA team is involved as soon as the business requirements are discussed. During the requirement gathering phase, testers review and validate the requirements, ensuring they are clear, testable, and unambiguous. They start designing test cases based on the requirements and work closely with business analysts to create acceptance criteria.

During the design phase, testers can provide input into potential testability issues, making sure that the architecture supports automated testing early in development.

testRigor offers continuous testing support to the development team. You can use our generative AI-based testing tool to rapidly run end-to-end tests on your applications and catch any potential issues as soon as a feature is added or modified. In Traditional Shift Left, test cases are designed in the early phases of the SDLC. With testRigor, these test cases can be created as soon as requirements are defined, reducing the gap between requirement gathering and test case design.

Incremental Shift Left Testing

In Incremental Shift Left Testing, the testing activities are moved to earlier stages in the software development process, with a focus on iterative development, where code and features are delivered in small, manageable increments. These chunks are then built upon each other to deliver the software to the customer. After the delivery is completed, the software is incremented further to proceed with the new operational testing and acceptance testing. Testing becomes a continuous process throughout the development lifecycle rather than being confined to the final stages.

The process continues until all the tasks and deliverables are successfully managed.

This type of shift-left strategy is suitable for large and complex systems. If done manually, there are huge chances of test failures and no scope for software quality validation due to inefficient incremental testing.

Characteristics:

• Frequent Testing in Each Sprint: Testing is done continuously, with each new feature or increment of code being tested as soon as it is developed.
• Collaboration with Developers: Testers work closely with developers in each sprint, ensuring that new features are thoroughly tested before they are integrated into the larger system.
• Regression Testing: As new increments are added, regression testing ensures that the new code does not break existing functionality.

Example of Incremental Shift Left Testing:

Consider an e-commerce application being developed in two-week sprints. The first sprint focuses on implementing the product search functionality, while subsequent sprints add features like filtering, sorting, and user reviews. In Incremental Shift Left, the QA team works in parallel with developers, testing each feature as it is completed in the sprint.

With testRigor, you get test results in minutes – no matter how large your test suite is. Tests are ultra-stable and ultra-reliable, since there is no reliance on implementation details, and many parameters are being automatically analysed when selecting any particular element. This allows for a seamless integration into the CI pipeline, thereby executing predefined tests and providing instant feedback on the quality of the new code. It also fits the incremental shift left testing approach really well.

Since Incremental Shift Left involves frequent feature updates, minimizing maintenance is critical. testRigor automatically adapts to minor changes in the UI or feature set, ensuring that tests don’t break with every iteration.

Benefits of Shift Left Testing with testRigor

Here are the main benefits of incorporating Shift Left Testing using testRigor’s intelligence.

More tests in the early stages

Starting from operational testing to unit testing, you move from one scenario to another and conduct similar tests in sequence or in parallel. When it comes to UI testing, testRigor makes your shift left testing and retesting remarkably faster than its competitors.

In fact, you can execute all your test cases within around 15 minutes using the parallelization feature.

Quicker and simpler testing process

Since testing is a core part of your planning, development, and production phases, it’s important to accelerate the process as fast as your testing system can handle. testRigor’s in-built mechanism lets you run all your tests in plain English.

This means your testers don’t need to learn a programming language and can immediately start creating automated no-code tests.

Integrates quality assurance into development

Shift left testing was primarily introduced to improve the code quality and accelerate the development and delivery processes. An automation tool such as testRigor frees up QA time, which would previously be spent on manual regression, and enables testers to focus on creating new test cases ahead of time. Which, in turn, helps shift to true quality assurance instead of quality control.

Automated testing for every development stage

In Shift Left Testing, automated tests need to be created at every stage of the development process. However, maintaining test scripts as the product evolves can be a challenge. testRigor solves this problem with its AI-powered test automation, which requires minimal maintenance. The platform’s ability to automatically adjust to UI changes without requiring constant updates to test scripts ensures that automated tests stay relevant and effective throughout the development lifecycle.

Reduce time-to-market

Software needs to be developed at a faster pace so your company can match the market demands and stay relevant among your customers. testRigor is one of the few software testing platforms that can reduce your test maintenance up to 99.5%.

Whether you are looking for integration testing, acceptance testing, or some other types of functional testing, we work along with you. Your development team’s work is also eased down through our seamless integration with Jenkins, Azure DevOps, and other CI/CD products.

Focus on the user experience

It’s crucial to test with the customer in mind. With testRigor, you can bring that paradigm to the next level, since all automated tests are being created from a human perspective. All elements are referenced from the visual standpoint, not relying on implementation details how it’s typically done in the QA automation world.

As an added benefit, your tests will even survive an entire underlying web framework change – as long as UI stays untouched.

Better software development lifecycle than with Selenium

Some of the key advantages of testRigor are speed of test creation (which can be 15x faster than with Selenium), as well as massively decreased efforts towards test maintenance. These benefits result in substantial time savings, which will help your QA team focus more on test execution results and deliver the optimal solution for your development team to work upon.

With our Chrome extension, testRigor further reduces the test creation time by 20x, which is the fastest way to recognize the benefits of employing test automation. Read why testRigor is an excellent alternative to Selenium.

Here’s Why Top Companies Choose testRigor

Popular brands like Netflix, Upgrade, IDT, and EdCast have adopted our AI-powered, no-code, plain English testing methodology to boost their performance testing approach.

According to Keith Powe, VP of Engineering at IDT Corporation, his team could automate only four test cases a week per person, but with testRigor, they have increased their test coverage from less than 50% to more than 90% in under 9 months. Spending a maximum of 0.1% of the time on test maintenance, IDT has a 90% reduction in bugs and a more effective CI/CD.

Here’s another testimonial from Upgrade, a San Francisco-based FinTech company, which now creates 3X more automated tests than before with testRigor’s behavior-driven testing strategy.

Practice Shift Left Testing with testRigor

If you combine testRigor and your software development process from the very beginning, you can implement an efficient shift-left testing strategy. This, in turn, will lead to a much more coherent team effort, timely releases, and fewer issues skipping into production for your users. The above will also result in immediate and extended money savings.

You can make shift left testing an integral part of your organization. All you need is a demo with testRigor to figure out the type of shift left testing that works for you and get started with the process!

“We spent so much time on maintenance when using Selenium, and we spend nearly zero time with maintenance using testRigor.”

Keith Powe VP Of Engineering - IDT