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So “shift left” is roughly equivalent to “tests first” or “TDD”?
by leoc 2y ago
So “shift left” is roughly equivalent to “tests first” or “TDD”?
- marcellus23 2y agoI would say tests first/TDD is a form of shifting left, but it can encompass more than that.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoIt can also mean manual testing earlier. Valve credits playtesting early and playtesting often for their success with Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and other games.
- Fuzzwah 2y agoNot just when they play tested but how. Silently watching someone play, only taking notes. No debrief. Source: the week I spent in the Valve offices in 2005, having Valve staff playing our in development HL2 mod.
- CodeAndCuffs 2y agoWas it Dystopia, by chance?
- mehagar 2y agoMore broadly it includes moving activities that are normally performed at a later stage so that they are earlier in the process. The idea is that defects found later in the process are more costly.
- hitchstory 2y agoThat's just one example of it. Other examples: * Replacing automated tests with (quicker) type checking and running it on a git commit hook instead of CI. * Replacing slower tests with faster tests. * Running tests before merging a PR instead of after. * Replacing a suite of manual tests with automation tests. etc.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoOr, again more generally: - implementing security features earlier (DevSecOps) - implement tracing and metrics/analysis tools earlier, use them to test and debug apps earlier (as opposed to laptop-based solutions) - building the reliable production model earlier (don't start with a toy model on your laptop if you're gonna end up with an RDS instance in AWS; build the big production thing first, and use it early on) - add synthetic end-to-end tests early on The linked article is talking about Shift Left in the context of developing semiconductors, so you can see how it can be applied to anything. Just do the needed thing earlier, in order to iterate faster, improve quality, reduce cost, ship faster.
- skybrian 2y agoYes, it can be applied to anything, but might not pay off with software like it does with semiconductors? Better tests and more static analysis are useful, but teams will often work on making their releases faster and easier, iterating more frequently, and then testing some things in production. We don’t want our software to be too brittle, so it should tolerate more variation in performance. But with chip design, they can’t iterate that fast and performance is more important, so they are doing more design and testing before the expensive part, using increasingly elaborate simulations.
- js8 2y agoSo aside from automation (which also has tradeoffs), when you shift left, what gets shifted right?
- saynay 2y agoThe knowledge needed to do the 'shift-left' tasks. The downside of making your developers take on more tasks that used to be handled by someone further down the chain is they need to know how to do those tasks.
- hammock 2y agoWhy can’t you shift the “someone further down the line” left along with the task?
- crabbone 2y agoNo, not really. It's a concept from the bygone era, before X-as-a-service took over a lot of software categories. It was intended to minimize friction between the QA and the development teams at the time the product was handed to QA. If the product had multiple defects, incrementally discovered, it would have to travel back and forth between the QA and the developers, stalling the development of the next version and generally creating a lot of noise and inconvenience due to the surrounding bureaucracy. There's no need to write tests upfront for you to shift left. All shift left means is that testing happens during development. Whether you start by writing tests and then write the actual program or the other way around -- doesn't matter.