Shift Left

A "Shift left" approach is taken to embed quality assurance activities earlier in the SoftwareDevelopmentLifeCycle (SDLC); activities are moved to the left on a timeline. By incorporating controls for early alignment (including reviews and inspections) along with strategically placed unit, integration, manual, and automated tests, we build good quality into the software rather than inspecting bad quality out.

Quality assurance in agile software development teams that have shifted left follow these steps:

1. During Backlog Grooming, ProductOwner, SoftwareEngineer, and QualityEngineer establish a shared understanding of what will make the user story successful, and encode this knowledge in feature files
2. SoftwareEngineer codes the feature, while (simultaneously) the
3. QualityEngineer uses the feature file to generate test automation code
4. As the developer completes their work, they can immediately use the test automation code to make sure that their work satisfies the success criteria agreed to up front

End result: The process protects the organization by helping the SoftwareEngineer deliver the right thing faster.

Using BehaviorDrivenDevelopment can help organizations shift left.

Additional Resources

• Shift Left BDD (Context & Examples) - 18 slides (Ultranauts Only)

-- NicoleRadziwill - 13 Apr 2020