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The Ultimate Guide to Shift-left Testing

Introduction

In today's competitive era, the demand to deliver quality software products in a cost and time-effective manner continues to accelerate. To accommodate that need, more and more companies are now incorporating shift-left testing to their product development processes. To help you better understand this methodology, in this article, we will delve into the basic tenets of shift-left testing, its benefits, and how to measure success.

What is Shift-Left Testing?

Shift-left testing comes about to test earlier in the development process. Even with Agile teams breaking away from the traditional Waterfall development model, testing always seems to be the last step.

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Why Is Automation the Only Way to Deliver Continuous Testing in Agile?

The use of agile methodologies for testing and development of software applications is growing rapidly. More and more businesses are adopting agile approaches in their application development cycle. That’s why most testing teams are focused on improving and enhancing their agile management.

Agile methodologies allow teams to carry out software development throughout SDLC so that bugs can be detected in the early stages of development, and developers can fix them immediately. It is being said that when agile development and testing come together, speed becomes the primary focus for both developers and testers. And it is true because for continuous delivery in agile development, implementing continuous testing in DevOps becomes critical.

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Why Is Software Testing and QA Important for Any Business?

QA and testing are essential for every business.

Software testing is recognized to be the procedure in which an application or software is validated or verified to ensure that it is free from bugs or errors. It is also done to ensure whether the software accomplishes the technical requirements, as guided by the development and design. In addition to this, it also ensures that the requirements of the user are accomplished efficiently and effectively and the boundary and exceptional cases are handled perfectly.

You may also enjoy: The Importance of QA Testing for Software Development

In addition to detecting the faults in the software, software testing is also useful in bringing an improvement in the software, in terms of accuracy, efficiency, as well as usability. Besides this, it is also useful to measure the performance, functionality, and specification of the software application or program.

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Truly Becoming Agile by Piping in Automation Testing

Automation testing is essential to good Agile practices.

If you have worked in the technology industry during the last few decades, you have heard the term "Agile" more times than you can count.

Agile, DevOps–the industry tosses these buzzwords around like free candy. But how can companies become agile in today’s technology sector?

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What You Need to Know About DevTestOps

What is DevTestOps?

The DevOps movement or culture celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2018. It is now critical to the success of many organizations.

The original definition of DevOps by practitioners Len Bass, Ingo Weber and LIming Zhu is interesting. “It is a set of practices that helps reduce the time between committing a change to a system and committing the change into normal production – all the while ensuring high quality.”

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Why Continuous Testing Is The Best Thing That Happened to Digital Transformation

Change has always been at the center of mankind's evolution, mapping the journey since the primitive era to this digital age. Continuous experimentation, trials and errors, continuous improvement and integration into everyday life, and then the continuous distribution of the experimented, adapted technology has led us to where we stand today. From simply surviving on necessities to building a life of luxury and convenience, mankind has surely come a long way. The extent to which we have evolved, the distance that we have traversed, has brought us to the point of advancement where we exist physically but survive digitally.

Evolution has been the only constant over the centuries of our existence. But what makes digital transformation so revolutionizing is its capability of bridging the difference between physical and digital. When a snake sheds its skin, it changes; when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it transforms. Digital transformation is metamorphosizing every industry into a winged butterfly. But, if done wrong, you'll only have a really fast caterpillar who may complete the designated tasks much faster, but at the cost of quality and efficiency. This is where continuous testing takes the reins — to ensure that your organization truly transforms into an enterprise capable of delivering excellent customer satisfaction rapidly.

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Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: Experiences of Testers Who Have Shifted Left & Right

In previous posts, I've shared my own experiences with "shifting left and right," also known as continuous testing, and how testing-related activities change when you make this shift. I'd like to share experiences from other testing practitioners as they have moved into participating throughout the software development build, observe, measure, and learn loop.

Let's learn what a few testers have found as they got involved with testing at various points in the continuous development cycle. If you haven't yet been able to embrace continuous testing, these stories may give you some ideas on how to get started making the move.

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Continuous Integration and Testing Using Postman With Jenkins

Continuous integration and testing are the key terms to integrate all the phases of the development lifecycle and deliver working product/software to a client at the earliest possible time using tools like Jenkins. Here, you will get to know about performing continuous REST API testing using Postman with Jenkins tools.

Postman is a tool used to develop, test, share, monitor the performance of an automated test and document API’s. Follow the below steps to integrate Postman with Jenkins for continuous integration and testing.

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Continuous Testing: The Missing Link in the Continuous Delivery Process

In today's Agile age, Continuous Delivery is not only a great concept but an increasingly critical one. This discipline, which facilitates the release of software to production at any time, supports Agile practices and can cut the time-to-release of websites and apps from several weeks to just a few hours.

However, it could be argued that the industry hasn't closed the circle yet when it comes to realizing a full Continuous Delivery Process.

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New Research Shows Continous Testing Separates Agile + DevOps Leaders from Laggards

Want further evidence that Continuous Testing has evolved from buzzword to business imperative? New Forrester research found that Continuous Testing, done properly, is a key differentiator between DevOps + Agile leaders and DevOps + Agile laggards. Here are the key findings and recommendations from that research project.

Key Continuous Testing Findings

1. Five Core Continuous Testing Practices Separate Successful Dev Ops + Agile Leaders from Laggards

Firms that are more mature in Agile + DevOps do five key things differently:

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Shifting Testing Left: How to Get it Right

If your business depends on web and mobile applications to connect with customers and drive transactions — and what business doesn’t these days? — then a great deal of your success or failure as a company hinges on your ability to continuously deliver a flawless digital experience. It’s no surprise then that shift left testing is fast becoming the foundation of the agile development process.

After all, the very idea behind agile development is to enable teams to continually push code and update apps — something you simply can’t do if you’re constantly uncovering bugs at the tail end of the delivery pipeline. Teams thus have no choice but to find ways to run a high volume and wide variety of tests as early in the development cycle as possible.      

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How to Shift Left: Four Tips to Change Team Culture

As the “shift-left” mindset begins to take hold, it is important to remember that embedding key technical practices earlier in the delivery pipeline will only deliver value if all teams are prepared and on board with the change. Continuous testing, for example, is essential and may require more of a shift in culture than technology.

Most shift-left discussions focus on automation tools and techniques. But an area that many fail to touch on is culture. This is arguably the most important consideration of all. Simply instructing engineering and operations teams that shift-left is the new world order is unlikely to get them onboard. What’s more, it risks furthering the silent divisions between siloed teams. This is why a cross-organizational culture must be addressed. If you do the right thinking up front, confronting behavioral and cultural challenges early, your shift-left strategy is more likely to succeed and improve delivery performance. With this in mind, here are four tips and practices to help enable a shift-left transformation.

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How to Implement DevOps Testing

The DevOps definition differs from one practitioner to another. Some organizations implement DevOps as practice, while others adopt a culture or movement. But each organization needs to implement a series of changes by shifting from traditional software development practices to DevOps. In addition, they need to create an environment in which all software development activities (coding, testing, implementation and start-up) are seamlessly integrated into a single cycle.

DevOps requires companies to facilitate continuous communication and collaboration between programmers, evaluators, and operations personnel. In addition, professionals need to use specialized tools to unify development, quality control, and operations without problems. At the same time, the company should focus in particular on the implementation of DevOps tests to assess the quality of the software from the planning stage to the implementation phase of the project. Therefore, each company must focus on many factors to perform DevOps tests efficiently.

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Practical Uses for Machine Learning in Software Delivery

As explained in the 2018 State of DevOps Report, high-performing software teams use key technical practices such as continuous testing, monitoring, and observability. We’re trying to shorten that learning loop. As a developer about to check in changes for a new feature, wouldn’t it be nice to know before you commit whether the changes will behave as desired, and whether they will break something else in the application? That would be the ultimate feedback loop!

Getting Feedback

Part of continuous testing is having automated test suites at various levels, such as unit, API, UI, testing various quality attributes, such as functionality, security, accessibility, performance. We run these tests in our pipelines. Unit-level tests give us quick feedback. Feedback from UI tests takes longer, but gives us more confidence in our product.

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How To Implement Continuous Testing In DevOps Like A Pro

In a decade, the need for software development has evolved drastically. The software has become a key differentiator for companies to gain a competitive edge, especially if your company falls under the SaaS umbrella. From the implementation of traditional processes such as a waterfall in their SDLC, organizations are now transitioning towards Agile in order to deliver software at a faster pace in the market. To cope up with RAD (Rapid Application Development), we have witnessed numerous new approaches such as CI/CD, DevOps, and Shift Left testing to build, develop and optimize software delivery. Even so, trying to maintain both quality and speed is a real challenge, and testing methodologies can either aid or downshift this whole acceleration process. Today, we are going to look into the importance of Continous Testing in DevOps. In this article, I will be talking about what continuous testing is all about. I will also help clear the fog around the myths associated with continuous testing. We will also be touching the challenges involved in continuous testing in DevOps, and best practices to help you execute the continuous testing process as a professional. 

What Is Continuous Testing?

Continuous testing is an end-to-end quality maintenance process in which teams carry out a broad range of automated tests on an ongoing basis. Simultaneously, analyzing various business risks associated with the latest software development and providing the developers with quick feedback. This feedback helps to identify defects and errors at a very early stage and encourages developers to optimize their code during successive stages of the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle).