Testin Strategies
What it Shift-left Testing?
The shift-left approach involves moving testing activities earlier in the software development lifecycle. It emphasizes the early involvement of QA professionals in the requirements gathering, design, and development stages.
By catching and addressing issues earlier, it reduces the time and effort required for bug fixing and improves overall product quality.
As per my experience this has being an eternal battle for QA teams to be integrated since the beginning of the cases
How to implement Shift-left testing
Early QA involvement:
Encourage QA professionals to actively participate in project kick off, planning, requirements gathering, and design discussions. This allows them to understand the project goals, identify potential risks, and contribute their expertise to ensure quality is considered from the beginning, as well with this there is a lot of improvement to do requirements traceability.
Collaboration and communication:
Foster a culture of collaboration between developers, QA professionals, and other stakeholders. Encourage open communication channels to facilitate early identification and resolution of issues. Regular meetings, such as daily stand-ups or sprint planning sessions, can help align everyone's understanding of requirements and expectations stage by stage in the software lifecycle.
Requirements validation:
QA should review and validate requirements early on to identify any ambiguities, inconsistencies, or gaps. This helps ensure that the requirements are clear, testable, and aligned with quality objectives. QA professionals can provide feedback and work closely with the business analysts or product owners to refine the requirements, from a more analytical/test case view.
Test planning in advance:
Start test planning and test case design as soon as the requirements and designs are available. This allows QA to identify test scenarios, test data requirements, and testing approaches in advance. Test planning should be an iterative process that evolves as the project progresses. Since early stages, we can start asking for information, accesses or environments needed ahead of time.
Test environment setup:
Ensure that the necessary test environments, including development and staging environments, are set up early in the project. This enables QA to start building and executing test cases as soon as development activities begin. Collaborate with the development team to address any infrastructure or environment setup issues.
For sure having a dedicated test environment provides isolation from the production environment and other development environments. This ensures that testing activities do not impact the live system or other ongoing development work.
Test automation:
Invest in test automation frameworks and tools to automate repetitive and time-consuming test activities. Develop a suite of automated tests that can be executed as part of the build process or on-demand. Test automation helps in early bug detection, faster regression testing, and continuous integration.
Early defect reporting:
QA should report defects as soon as they are identified during testing. Clear defect reports with detailed steps to reproduce and supporting evidence help developers quickly understand and address the issues. Early defect reporting ensures that issues are resolved early in the development cycle, reducing rework and improving overall quality.