Shift-Right Testing: A Down-to-Earth Approach
Digital transformation is speeding up across different industries due to the unexpected and unprecedented COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. One of the key characteristics of digital transformation is agile. Agile means “able to move quickly and easily”, and it refers mainly to the software development lifecycles.
Simply put, to be agile, organizations should be responding quickly to user feedback of any kind. So how? Testing is what usually springs to mind. In fact, continuous testing is not something new, and it has been embraced in the DevOps practices. Intuitively, testing tends to shift left (performing testing earlier in the development process) because it’s preferable to locate bugs and problems as early as possible. The shift-left approach undoubtedly establishes a swift feedback loop. Though if you read again the first line of this paragraph, the key phrase here is “user feedback” instead of just “feedback.
Let’s Shift Right
Shift Right Testing refers to the testing to be performed in the later stage of the development process, usually in the pre-release and production stage. Shift RIght Testing includes techniques such as A/B testing, canary testing, crowd testing, API monitoring, App monitoring, etc. The essence of Shift Right Testing is to use production data, user feedback and user behavior to design the test, which ensures the optimal behavior, performance, usability of an application.
While 100% of quality is quite an unrealistic goal, especially in the agile process, shifting test practices to the right means leveraging real-world users’ feedback, experiences and data to improve the development process. Establishing a continuous feedback loop between users and development team means the application is fixing, improving and evolving with real-world inputs instead of just internal view or guess, driving a more down-to-earth iteration process. It’s much easier to delight users with the application integrated with their own feedback. Even more, if the testing practices are properly integrated with automation and monitoring, the development team is more confident with what they have built and the resilience of the application. The more confident the team is, the faster the development cycles, the better the quality delivered to users.
At Resolve Technology, our DevOps orchestration solution embraces automation practices. We want to leverage the latest technology to facilitate an agile development process for our clients , reduce their time to market, and let them focus on developing and delivering the high quality applications to their clients.
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