What does shift left really mean?

Here’s my understanding and what it means to implement it:

Any activity to help us prevent or identify issues BEFORE someone spends dedicated time testing the change – Shift identification of issues & risks as early as possible.

I’d implement this by doing the following:

1. Have three amigo sessions before coding

2. Practice TDD & have decent unit test coverage

3. The developer and any other person on the team together test the change on the developers machine

4. Have quality gates on the pull request pipeline including static analysis, unit tests & component test

By the time engineers testing the feature start exploring in detail, most of the issues should have been fixed already.

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #ShiftLeft #ContinuousTesting #DevOps