Agile practices, being adopted almost universally, necessitate faster and earlier testing in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Bringing development and testing together early is commonly referred to as ‘shifting left’.
Traditional testing
A typical waterfall software development project would have seen testing occur immediately prior to release into production. This meant that when bugs or usability issues were inevitably found, the release would be delayed until these were fixed.
In this model, testing became a bottleneck that seriously impeded the ability of projects to deliver on time.
What’s shift left testing?
The easiest way to explain shift-left software testing is to think of the development cycle as a line running from left to right.
