By Jason English
I’ve spent most of my professional life convincing businesses to shift things left — shift-left testing for software, shift-left demand and supply forecasts for supply chains, shift-left analytics to understand future implications earlier than your competition.
Hopefully that explains why it seems heretical for me to talk about shift-right testing at all.
Will shift-right testing somehow cheapen shift- left testing, making it old news? Or could it cause some teams to stop early preventative testing, just like internet memes can prevent some otherwise rational people from getting vaccinations?
Shift-right is happening anyway
With intelligent CI/CD automation, DevOps practices and cloud-native delivery of software into microservices architectures, our software pipelines are moving at such breakneck speeds that much of the activity has moved into ensuring resiliency at change time and post-deployment phases.
Shift-right everything — including testing — seems to be inevitable.
Given how software development incentives are usually aligned with delivering more features to production, faster — rather than ensuring complete and early testing, I don’t expect many organizations will let shift-left testing activities gate or delay release cycles for very long.
So what should we do now, allow end customers to become software testers?
No matter how much we try testing earlier in the software lifecycle, with greater automation, there will always be too much change and complexity to prevent all defects from escaping into production — especially when the ever-changing software is likely executing on ephemeral cloud microservices and depending on calls to disparate APIs.
There are several interesting vendors that offer pieces of the shift-right puzzle, and to their credit, none really touch the third rail of saying you can leave out QA teams, or call themselves ‘shift-right testing.’ That’s smart marketing.
