Shift Left Testing – Clarity from the Start
In my years working in the software world, I’ve had the chance to work with many different teams. Each team had its own way of working and thinking about quality. Some made it really hard to talk about quality. Others understood it right away — especially when we talked about something called Shift Left Testing.
What Is Shift Left Testing?
It’s a simple idea:
Start thinking about quality and testing early — not at the end.
Instead of waiting until a feature is “done” to check if it works, teams that follow shift left testing build and test things side by side. It’s like checking your work as you go instead of waiting until the night before the deadline.
The people who liked this idea were the ones who wanted to take ownership of what they were building. They cared about building the right thing, the right way, from the beginning. They were open to working together — testers, developers, designers — all as one team.
In those teams:
- Test code was treated just like product code — important and necessary.
- No one waited until the last minute to test.
- Testing was part of building, not something extra.
As a tester, I took care of the big-picture tests, making sure everything worked together from a user’s point of view. And when we released, we knew our tests had our backs. We never had to ask, “Do we have enough test coverage?” — because we never released without it.
Post-release, the questions we asked were never about test gaps. Instead, we asked:
- Will our users love this feature?
- What do we build next?
Before Shift Left: A Story of Stress and Bugs
Not every team worked that way.
Some teams saw testing as someone else’s job, something separate from the real work of building features. In those places, things were confusing. People didn’t always agree on what we were building or how we should build it. That confusion showed up in the software.
Developers would write their code, day by day, and then, at the end testing was done — often just before a release. The exploratory testing sessions were expected to find all the problems under pressure. It was stressful and led to lots of bugs — especially in important features.
Fixing bugs at the last minute became normal.
But here’s the truth: real users behave in unpredictable ways. They’re not like the small team testing a feature before release. Even if we added tools to spot problems in production, those tools couldn’t stop the problems from happening in the first place.
When things broke in production, we had to fix them. But without shift left testing, that meant starting over — manually checking everything again. It took time. It slowed us down. And just when we thought things were stable, we had to rush to test everything again from end to end. It was the same case when a small enhancement was needed of such features.
After these kinds of releases, our questions changed:
- Why are things still so unclear?
- Did the feature really work the way it was supposed to?
- What bugs did users find after we launched?
- How much time will we need to stop building new things so we can go back and fix what’s broken?
Why Shift Left Matters
Shift left testing isn’t just a technique — it’s a mindset.
It helps teams:
- Get clear on what they’re building.
- Build things that are easier to test.
- Share responsibility for product quality.
And most importantly, it helps teams ship features they can be proud of — on time, and with confidence.
The Shift in Mindset Is Possible
The shift in mindset is possible for any team — no matter their size or history. The key is to find the right strategy that fits your team’s needs and workflow.
Once your team is on board and gets used to this way of working, software development begins to feel smoother — like flowers blooming in the spring. Things become clearer, bugs are caught earlier, and releases happen with confidence instead of chaos.