Shift Left is a beautiful glossy sticker
A sticker is a type of label. Aprinted piece of paper or other material with temporary adhesive on one side. It can be used for decoration or for functional purposes, depending on the situation.
In system design you try to break the problem you work on into simpler modules in a top down approach. Software architects talk about the tradeoffs and calculate constraints to address possible bottlenecks.
Agile teams refine stories in the backlog for so long, that you get them broken down into tasks that can be completed in days. You label your validation effort as different types of testing, even if it is just testing.
Logic dictates that getting something right on the first try, or earlier in time, has lower cost than changing all it’s dependencies and impacts later. There are no studies how earlier testing reduces the quality risk of a software delivery. Early testing lacks the contexts of integration, systems behavior, error conditions, infrastructure impacts and deep dependency observations, those little things that cost you the most to debug in production.
Since there is no published theory that I am familiar with, or actionable instructions what Shift Left actually means for large organizations and software factories, I consider it a label that expresses our goal to cut costs, even if it is just testing.
Testing is a series of controlled experiments and uncontrolled events. Delivering quality software by cutting costs which constrains our experiments is a placeholder of testing for anyone who is not concerned to think, learn or innovate in the area of testing.
Doing the right things at the right time matter. Context is king.
The author wishes to help the development environment hold the weather and reduce the number of disappointments experienced by millions of people in everyday life.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
