Difference Between Shift Left And Shift Right Testing

The phrase “Shift Left testing” has gotten a lot of attention since the Agile model and related approaches like Scrum, DevOps, and Kanban became standard practises in software development. Shift left testing also reduces the number of defects in production software. It’s about shifting from manual to automated testing so that there’s less quality work to do by the time you need to do manual testing. At the early stages of the development cycle, bugs are easier and cheaper to fix because they are caught earlier.

However, Shift Right Testing is used in conjunction with Shift Left Testing since consumers want higher levels of faultless operation from their applications and websites at all times. Naturally, teams and businesses often inquire “Shift Left versus Shift Right”? That question will be addressed in this post, along with some information on the effectiveness and usefulness of Shift Left and Shift Right Testing.

How The Transition From Waterfall To Agile Begin?

Let’s look at the world’s history before discussing the specifics of Shift Left and Shift Right Testing. You might be familiar with the waterfall model. If not, let’s have a quick recap. To summarise, this paradigm linearly aligns each stage of development. This firmly fixes testing and quality assurance as the final stage before to release. The timetable is clear, and everyone is aware of their duties. However, this strategy is rigid and only truly effective when there is a lengthy supply schedule.

As a consequence, contemporary organizations are using the Agile methodology for development more often. This depends on making regular changes and responding quickly to shifting demands. Teams have been able to update often and react quickly to problem patches thanks to the new techniques, allowing businesses to release new software more frequently. 

Shift Left Testing: What Is It?

Early and often are the two phrases that best describe Shift Left Testing. Shift Left testing is done on the left side of the development process. The testing phase of the software development lifecycle starts significantly earlier than the development and production phases. The customer, the developers, and the testers are all involved in a continuous feedback loop throughout the process.

It mostly focuses on the programme or application’s functional elements.

Shift Left Testing focuses on identifying flaws early in the SDLC so that risks may be foreseen and effectively handled. It is a proactive strategy that operates concurrently with the application’s development process. This procedure may be accelerated with precision and efficiency with end-to-end automation. This aids in the organization’s operational expenditure optimization so that the application may more easily conform to better quality norms.

The testing team starts working on the application after carefully outlining the bigger test plan in accordance with the client’s goals. The following tasks are listed for Shift Left testing’s test design phase:

• Recognizing end-user expectations, application behavior, and client needs
• Creating integration and functional tests
• Automated test execution from beginning to conclusion
• Parallel to the development process, unit testing

While carefully addressing each flaw along the route, the developers and testers remain in constant contact. It often but not always adopts a test-driven development methodology (TDD).

In a DevOps environment, the development team and the testing team collaborate more closely to guarantee that bugs are fixed during production itself. Testers participate in crucial customer and development team communications, facilitating the production of high-quality results that are easily understood by all parties.

Advantages Of Shift Left Testing

Following are some of the advantages of Shift Left Testing.

• Time saving: Shift Left Testing identifies errors earlier in the SDLC, doing away with the mentality of “let’s repair the faults after we’re done with the critical things.”
• Delivers quickly: Because Shift Left testing speeds up the development process, there is less rework involved.
• Better design: Thorough brainstorming sessions allow testers to identify bottlenecks before they become problems. These conclusions could lead to fresh design options or enable teams to enhance the original concept.

To ensure quality, testers might integrate an automated tool, such as unit or API testing, into their development process using the Shift Left methodology. This enables them to evaluate the code’s quality and identify problems when they are most crucial, assuring the delivery of high-quality software to end users.

Shift Left testing, despite all of its advantages, ignores user input based on real use circumstances. Shift Right testing is used in this situation.

Types Of Shift Left Testing

• Incremental Shift Left Testing: The creation of complicated high-level applications is where this testing strategy works best. This approach enables developers to construct one segment on top of the other while guaranteeing that each segment is correct and error-free. Complex scripts are divided into smaller parts and evaluated independently one after another.
• Traditional Shift Left Testing: This kind of testing strategy focuses only on unit and integration Testing while using API testing and cutting-edge testing technologies. This method’s failure to prioritize system-level and acceptability testing is one of its flaws.
• Model-Based Shift Left Testing: Model-based Shift Left Testing employs the notion of early-stage Testing throughout the design and development stages, which covers design models, executable requirements, and architecture, aids in the correction of around 50-60% of mistakes produced during these early development phases.
• Agile/DevOps: The Agile/DevOps Shift Left testing methodology has lately gained popularity and is used by many businesses.

Shift Right Testing: What Is It?

In testing terminology, the Shift Right strategy is all about testing the application after production but before deployment, in contrast to the Shift Left approach. It mostly addresses how well the programme performs in actual environments.

The Shift Right technique tests the application’s functionality, usability, and resilience in safe contexts. Shift Right testing meticulously seeks for and replicates real-world use scenarios. Shift Right testing takes place at the post-production stage, on the right side of the development process. The programme has been fully created and is ready, but it has to be thoroughly tested to ensure that it is reliable, performant, and provides a wonderful user experience.

To acquire input on the performance of the programme from the target users, canary releases, A/B testing, and blue-green deployments are used. Additionally, tools for error detection are employed to collect more performance information. To learn how effectively it functions in real time, it often depends on user input.

Advantages Of Shift Right Testing

Following are the benefits of Shift Right Testing.

• Better customer experience: Teams may transform client input into problems for business and technical terminology by moving to the right. This makes it simple to identify each issue and fix it so that the entire user experience is improved.
• More potential for automation: You may automate feature releases using feature flags, canary Testing, and dark launching. Time is saved in this way.
• Better coverage: Shift Right testing enables you to cover more ground throughout your Testing. You are more likely to uncover any issues since Testing is ongoing. Additionally, having more data makes it simpler to analyse faults and pinpoint the actions necessary to produce them.

Types Of Shift Right Testing

• Chaos Testing: This kind of Testing involves manually inserting mistakes into the system code to see how the software will behave in hypothetical situations. Technically, fake chaos is produced to test how well the program performs under pressure, which enables developers to find and repair flaws before the application is made available to the general public. To make your Testing faster and more effective, you may automate this process using a variety of performance testing tools. The main goal is to determine how the application will react in the event that its network or infrastructure is suddenly attacked.
• Testing A/B: Common names for this kind of Testing are split testing and bucket testing. To determine which design produces more leads for the company, multiple versions of a web page are made and evaluated separately. It occurs within the conversion rate provision procedure, where the original page and the page with minimal changes are compared to determine how well each is doing separately. The old page is eventually trashed and replaced with the one that produces more leads.
• Constant Quality Inspection (CQM): At every step of the software lifecycle, continuous quality monitoring helps to improve the system’s quality. To keep track of the quality of any program while it is being developed, several tools and methods are used. Code instrumentation, real user monitoring, and virtual user monitoring are a few of the most popular CQM approaches that may be used throughout the software development process.

In DevOps, When Should You Shift Left And Shift Right?

Shift Left testing may cut down on software bugs and shorten the time it takes to launch. Teams that practice Shift Left include Testing often before any code is developed and all the way through development. Shift Left Testing verifies that software complies with the requirements established by the company rather than Testing for functionality.

Shift Right methodologies, on the other hand, may more effectively guarantee production dependability by testing software in real-world settings and during production. Teams benefit from broader testing coverage as a consequence, which better solves user experience issues.

Integrating DevOps With Shift Left And Shift Right Testing

It is crucial to comprehend how often and when we should test when discussing how to introduce the Shift Left and Shift Right strategy to Testing in an agile application development environment.

It makes no sense to have a predetermined testing schedule if Testing is only performed once throughout the development stage since this would cause a delay at the conclusion of the delivery stage. Instead, a good testing plan would include Testing in each and every cycle, sprint, iteration, etc. These agile approaches, which include test-driven development, are now being used by many contemporary organizations. The ultimate goal is to seamlessly integrate Testing into development and guarantee that both left and right shift testing methodologies are used throughout the development process.

To sum up, it can be said that both Shift Left and Shift Right testing methodologies should be used throughout the application development process. These strategies enable your testing, operations, and development teams to collaborate and provide high-quality goods to your consumers.

Even if your team tests your application at each and every stage of production, you may always make improvements while it is still in the development stage. The importance of finding the proper testing balance in your development cycle should not be underestimated. You don’t want your engineers to spend all of their time testing and lose their crucial degree of inventiveness. This is where testing process automation can save the day.

Here, automation may help you save a ton of time and provide higher-quality, more accurate, and more effective outcomes. On the other side, manual Testing could cause your system to experience new bottlenecks. There are a ton of advantages to automated Testing that may be transferred to your development.

It is now evident where this is going after going through the importance of application testing using the Shift Left and Shift Right testing technique. Continuous Testing is achieved by combining Shift Left and Shift Right testing and a little amount of automation.

To perform Shift Left and Shift Right testing, you can opt for test automation cloud like LambdaTest. With their robust,  lightning-fast, and secure cloud-based platform, you can enjoy Shift Left and Shift Right testing more quickly than previously. You can test effortlessly on more than 3000 real devices, browsers, browser versions, and operating systems. LambdaTest offers both manual and automated testing of website and mobile applications. It supports different automated testing tools like Selenium, Cypress, Appium, Espresso, etc

Wrapping-Up!

As you can see, each shift—left or shift—has advantages of its own. The former may be used by agile teams to facilitate implementations, save costs, and accelerate issue fixes. However, Shift Right testing is equally important since it allows for the fusion of system and user input based on real-world events. Therefore, the question is not which method is best for your organization, but rather how to combine the two for the best results.