Your team is in the final stretch of a project when a critical bug suddenly surfaces. Deadlines are looming, stress levels are high, and fixing this issue throws your entire timeline into chaos.
Sounds familiar?
This is exactly the kind of situation shift left testing can prevent.
In shift left testing, instead of running tests at the end of development, you integrate testing and development like bread and butter. The result: you can catch bugs early, collaborate better, and avoid any last-minute disasters.
But how do you implement a shift left testing approach? That’s exactly what we’ll cover in this article.
How Shift Left Testing Can Improve Your QA Strategy
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat is the Shift Left Testing Approach?
Shift left testing is a proactive approach in software development in which testing activities are planned earlier in the development cycle, ‘shifting left’ on the project timeline.
Instead of waiting until the end of development to start testing, you begin testing during the design and development stages.
This efficient approach helps you identify and fix bugs earlier, reducing the cost and time needed to resolve them later while ensuring a smoother user experience at release.
For instance, if you work at an e-commerce company building a new checkout feature, you can apply shift left testing to involve testers as soon as the design is drafted. Automated tests would run as the code is being written to catch issues such as incorrect tax calculations or payment gateway errors.
Difference Between Shift Left Testing and Traditional Testing
How does shift left testing differ from a traditional testing approach? Let’s understand the difference better:
| Aspect | Shift Left Testing | Traditional Testing |
| Testing Schedule | Testing starts from the early development stages | Testing occurs after the development phase |
| Focus | Emphasizes early detection of defects, primarily through continuous integration, unit tests, and even requirement validation | Focuses on defect discovery at the end of the development cycle, typically with system-level or user acceptance testing after features are fully built |
| Tools and Practices | Uses tools (like Selenium, JUnit, or Jenkins) and practices like test-driven development (TDD) or behavior-driven development (BDD), which integrate testing into coding and design phases | Relies more on manual and end-to-end testing tools such as UAT tools and system-wide testing frameworks |
| Risk Management | Mitigates risks early, offering more stability and predictability | Exposes critical risks closer to deadlines, leading to rushed fixes or delays |
Principles of Shift Left Testing
Shift left testing is built upon a few basic principles. These include:
- Extensive collaboration: Developers, testers, and stakeholders work together from the start to ensure quality is considered in every phase
- Early involvement: Testing starts early in the development process so you can identify and address potential issues sooner
- Balanced testing automation: Automated tests are run frequently, allowing you to get quicker feedback and catch issues as soon as they arise
🔎Read More: Types of Testing in Software Engineering
Summarize this article for me pleaseBenefits of Shift Left Testing
Apart from saving costs and preventing last-minute anxiety, there are several benefits you could derive from incremental shift left testing. Here are a few:
Comprehensive risk mitigation
By getting involved early in the testing process, teams can pinpoint risks related to new features or code changes before they affect the entire system. This proactive approach ensures thorough testing of critical paths in the application, lowering the chance of failure in the production environment.
Reduced operational costs and last-minute fixes
Detecting issues at an early stage helps prevent costly repairs and project setbacks that often arise when encountering bugs later in the process. This lowers overall development expenses and accelerates the product’s time-to-market.
A research graph from software development metrics expert Capers Jones also supports this by showcasing that the longer you let bugs rest, the costlier they get for you.
Enhanced collaboration between development and testing teams
Shift left testing encourages the inclusion of testers from the initial phases of the project, such as requirements gathering, daily stand-ups, and sprint planning sessions, to ensure that all team members are aligned on project objectives and quality standards.
This allows testers to better understand the project scope and objectives, enabling them to design tests that align with user expectations and project goals.
Tester-developer collaboration also enables a continuous feedback loop for developers, allowing them to make adjustments based on immediate feedback. This reduces the likelihood of significant defects later in the process.
💡Learn More: ClickUp Forms streamlines data collection for software teams, eliminating the chaos of juggling multiple tools and ensuring efficient workflows.
Automated testing workflows
The integration of automation within the shift left testing framework enables teams to cover a broader range of scenarios and edge cases that might be impractical to test manually.
Using automation tools, teams can run extensive test suites that include unit tests, integration tests, and regression tests without significantly increasing the workload on testers.
Unlike manual testing, which can be subject to human error or variability, automated tests deliver consistent results across different environments and software iterations.
Faster product releases
Shift left testing prioritizes early testing to identify and resolve defects quickly, leading to shorter development cycles. Continuous testing ensures higher software quality and reduces the need for extensive post-release maintenance, which can be costly and time-consuming.
This further leads to faster and higher-quality product releases, allowing businesses to better manage releases and respond swiftly to market demands and customer feedback.
Companies that deliver high-quality products are more likely to retain customers and gain positive reviews, further solidifying their market position.
Summarize this article for me pleaseImplementing Shift Left Testing
To implement shift left testing effectively in your software development process, follow these structured steps:
Step 1: Involve testers right from the start
Shift left testing begins with involving testers during the requirements phase. When you have the briefing with your developers, let them know what the client is looking for.
Take their input to ensure that the requirements are clear, testable, and aligned with the project’s objectives.
Let your testers generate edge cases or customer scenarios to ensure that all potential issues are captured before coding even begins.
🧠Did You Know? Atrato accelerated product development by 30% with ClickUp. Read Atrato’s success story.
Step 2: Incorporate testing into design
In the design phase, you should work with testers to create a testing strategy that aligns with system architecture and user workflows. This includes designing tests for key areas like security, performance, and usability.
For instance, if you are building an automotive software diagnostics system, incorporate security and safety testing into the design to meet industry standards and prevent vulnerabilities right at the start.
Step 3: Use proven methodologies
Agile frameworks and Agile testing tools work exceptionally well with the shift-left testing model to achieve optimum results in early bug fixing.
You can choose from Test-Driven Development (TDD), Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), and Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD). They all enhance shift left testing by encouraging early testing and collaboration. To learn more about them, keep reading.
Step 4: Automate testing
Set up automated testing pipelines early in the project. Use continuous integration (CI) tools like Jenkins and Selenium that automatically run tests every time new code is added. This allows you to catch issues faster without manual intervention and fix them before they escalate.
Step 5: Integrate testing into CI/DI pipelines
Ensure your tests are part of the CI/CD pipeline so that every code change is automatically tested, validated, and prepared for deployment. This reduces the time spent on manual testing and accelerates releases.
Step 6: Collaborate and communicate often
Encourage regular communication through stand-ups and review meetings to keep everyone aligned on quality goals. You can’t have people developing and testing with different results in mind, even for small parts of the project.
Best practices for shift left testing
We discussed the basic steps you must take to implement shift left testing. Here are some pro tips that will make the process even smoother:
- Prioritize: Focus on automating high-impact tests that cover critical functions and leave complex tests for manual review. This prevents over-automation in the long run
- Encourage ownership: Foster collaboration between developers and testers to own the product quality. You can do this by exchanging some part of developer and tester payouts with product stocks to incentivize performance
- Maintain identical test environments: Keep your development, testing, and production environments as identical as possible. This reduces the risk of environment-related bugs, which can be challenging to identify and fix later in the process
- Use parallel testing: Run tests in parallel, especially automated ones, to speed up the testing process
- Keep your test scripts updated: As the project evolves, regularly update your test scripts to reflect new features, functionality, or changes in requirements
Summarize this article for me pleaseShift Left Testing Methodologies
Shift left testing encompasses several methodologies that help integrate testing early in the software development lifecycle. Here’s a closer look at three prominent methods.
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)
BDD focuses on defining the application’s behavior according to what the user is expecting when they interact with it. In BDD, you write tests in a natural language format that everyone can understand.
It is a collaborative approach that encourages constant communication between developers, testers, and business stakeholders right from the beginning of the product development cycle.
📌Example: If you’re working on a travel booking application, write a BDD scenario to define the behavior of the flight search feature in plain language. This helps ensure that all stakeholders agree on the feature’s capabilities before coding begins.
Test-Driven Development (TDD)
TDD is a software development methodology in which tests are written before the actual code. The process follows a cycle:
- Write a failing test
- Write the minimum code necessary to pass the test
- Refactor the code
This approach helps you focus on requirements before implementation and reduces the likelihood of defects.
📌Example: In a financial services project, if you’re developing a new transaction processing feature, you would first write a test to verify that the transaction is processed correctly. Only after the test is in place would you write the code to implement that functionality.
Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD)
ATDD involves writing acceptance tests before the development begins. This methodology ensures that all stakeholders have a clear understanding of the acceptance criteria for a feature.
Product owners, business analysts, and testers usually define acceptance tests, which serve as a benchmark for what DONE means for each user story.
📌Example: If you’re developing a customer relationship management (CRM) system, you might have stakeholders define acceptance criteria for a new reporting feature. By writing acceptance tests upfront, you clarify what data needs to be included in the reports, ensuring you deliver precisely what is required.
🗒Learn more: 3 reasons why Gatekeeper switched from Jira to ClickUp to manage their software development life cycle.
Summarize this article for me pleaseTools and Resources for Shift Left Testing
Let’s look at a few testing tools that are good choices for shift left testing:
- Jenkins: An open-source automation server that enables continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) for software development
- Selenium: A widely used framework for automating web browser testing across multiple platforms and programming languages
- Postman: A collaboration platform for API development, allowing users to design, test, and share APIs efficiently
- TestSigma: A unified AI-driven platform for automating web, mobile, and API tests with minimal coding required
- TestLeft: A tool designed to integrate test automation into existing IDEs, enabling shift left testing by embedding automated tests early in development
Multiple tools exist to help you adopt shift left testing. However, if you’re looking for a singular tool to practice left testing consistently through better communication and collaboration, we recommend you check out ClickUp.
ClickUp for Software Development teams allows you to easily plan, build, and ship all in one place. You can create and share documentation to keep everyone aligned on goals, while version control ensures that changes and multiple software versions are tracked seamlessly.
Automation takes care of repetitive tasks like code reviews, and integrations with tools like GitHub and GitLab make code tracking effortless.
You also get real-time collaboration through comments, notifications, and team views to keep everyone on the same page. Let’s check out how.
Task management
ClickUp Tasks lets your teams create detailed tasks and subtasks specifically for testing earlier in the software development lifecycle.
You can assign software testing tasks to team members from the requirements phase onward, ensuring that testing is integrated early. Moreover, you can set due dates, priorities, and dependencies to keep everything organized.
You can also break down the testing phase into manageable subtasks, such as writing test cases, setting up test environments, and running tests.
Automation
With ClickUp Automations, you can streamline repetitive testing tasks to reduce manual effort in software development.
For instance, ClickUp can act as a great automation tool for bug tracking and QA testing.
With custom fields, task statuses, and over 35 ClickApps, you can tailor the platform to fit your specific QA processes. Then, you can automate tasks, assign teams, and even update statuses based on triggers.
You can also integrate ClickUp with modern QA testing tools like Jenkins and Selenium to automate your CI/CD pipeline. This ensures that testing runs automatically with each code change.
Custom dashboards
ClickUp Dashboards allow you to track real-time testing progress, visualize bug counts, test case execution, and more. You can create a dashboard that displays key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure that testing goals are met.
With ClickUp Views, you can also view your work in the way you choose—List, Table, Gantt chart, Calendar, or Board. ClickUp’s Board view, for instance, can be used as an intuitive bug-tracking board to help you organize bug bashes, manage Agile projects, break down tasks, and assign them to relevant members with ease.
Collaboration
ClickUp Collaboration Detection enables cross-functional teams to work together seamlessly. With threaded replies and Assigned Comments in ClickUp and real-time editing in ClickUp Docs, testing teams, developers, and product managers work together and resolve issues collaboratively.
Let’s now talk a bit about ClickUp’s Agile features. They make collaboration easy with the following:
- Sprint management: Easily plan, execute, and track your sprints with clear visual boards, lists, and timelines. Prioritize tasks, set sprint goals, and track progress effortlessly
- Backlog management: Manage backlog with the latest tasks and organize based on task priority
- Burndown charts: Get real-time insights into your sprint progress with detailed burndown charts to visualize how much work is left to meet your goals
- Agile dashboards: Customize Agile dashboards to track key metrics, visualize workflow, and make data-driven decisions, keeping your team aligned
Templates
ClickUp also offers multiple test case templates to simplify and accelerate your shift left testing workflows.
The ClickUp Test Management Template
For instance, the ClickUp Test Management Template is designed to simplify and organize your testing process from start to finish.
Whether you’re leading a large QA team or working solo, the ClickUp Test Management Template is a versatile solution. It streamlines tasks, tracks progress, and guarantees comprehensive testing for every part of your project.
Here’s how you can make the most of it:
- Create and manage detailed test cases with ease, ensuring every aspect of your project gets covered
- Assign tasks to team members and set deadlines to keep everyone on track
- Monitor test progress in real-time using customizable views like Board, List, or Calendar
- Track bugs and issues by using bug-tracking software and linking them directly to specific test cases for faster resolution
- Collaborate effortlessly with comments, attachments, and task updates to keep the entire team in sync
- Automate repetitive processes with built-in automation, reducing manual effort in managing tests
- Generate reports quickly to share testing insights with stakeholders or management
This template helps you simplify your testing process, stay organized, and ultimately deliver a higher-quality product.
Other templates
In addition, you have the ClickUp Test Report Template and the ClickUp Bug and Issue Tracking Templates.
The ClickUp Test Report Template allows you to easily document and summarize testing results, providing insights into passed, failed, or blocked tests. It helps you keep stakeholders informed by generating clear and structured reports that highlight overall test coverage, performance, and areas needing attention.
ClickUp Bug and Issue Tracking Templates streamline the process of logging, tracking, and managing bugs and issues in your projects. You can assign and prioritize bugs and monitor their progress to resolve issues efficiently.
Summarize this article for me pleaseOvercoming Challenges in Shift Left Testing
Shift left testing truly brings a lot of positives to the table. However, it also poses some challenges that you need to address effectively. Let’s take a look:
Lack of testing expertise among developers
Shift left testing requires your developers to take on more responsibility for testing, but they may lack the necessary skills, mindset, or time to perform quality tests. This can lead to incomplete or ineffective testing early in the process.
💡Top strategy: Continuously train developers on testing methodologies and tools. Pair developers with experienced testers or create collaborative testing environments where they can learn from each other.
Increased initial development time
Involving testing from the start will slow down initial development as your teams will have to focus on setting up testing frameworks and processes. This can put pressure on deadlines, especially for teams used to traditional workflows.
💡Top strategy: Adopt iterative development models like Agile or DevOps automation that accommodate testing’s early integration while keeping the process flexible. This will give you smaller, manageable chunks of development and testing.
Tooling and infrastructure costs
Shift left testing often requires specialized tools for test automation, performance testing, and continuous integration, which can be costly for smaller teams or organizations. If you are running a startup, you might not have the funds necessary to initiate automated testing processes initially.
💡Top strategy: Use open-source tools like Jenkins for continuous integration and Selenium for test automation. These tools reduce costs while still providing the necessary testing capabilities. A better all-in-one alternative is ClickUp which helps you automate, manage, and collaborate on all testing activities.
Cultural resistance
If you work with traditional teams, especially those used to waterfall models, they may resist adopting shift left testing. They may be hesitant to shift responsibilities and collaborate more closely between developers and testers.
💡Top strategy: Promote a culture of collaboration by organizing workshops and cross-functional team activities. Encourage frequent communication between developers, testers, and business stakeholders to break down silos.
Overwhelming amount of automated testing
When working with shift left testing, you will have to heavily rely on automation. While this speeds up the process, it can lead to over-automation, where tests become brittle or unnecessary, slowing down the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, even if you’re using the best continuous deployment tools.
💡Top strategy: Prioritize high-value tests by categorizing them based on their importance. Implement automated tests only where they provide value and rely on manual testing for complex, high-risk areas.
Summarize this article for me pleaseShift Left, Catch Early, and Deliver Better With ClickUp
If you want to make your product development cycle more efficient and streamlined, shift left testing is not a choice but a necessity.
Shift left testing helps fix costly errors before they snowball, allowing you to deliver higher-quality software faster. By integrating testing earlier in your development cycle, you can reduce bugs and enhance team collaboration and efficiency.
Ready to streamline your testing process? Try ClickUp’s powerful task management and automation tools to implement shift left testing seamlessly and keep your projects on track.
Sign up for ClickUp today!
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