Shift Right Testing
Probably you have already heard the definition of “Shift Left Testing”.
It is a practice that is normally focused, specially when you start pursuing your career in the QA field.
But, what they don’t tell you, is that this is only one side of the coin.
While it is very important that, during the development phase, starting testing as early as possible is a best practice, and will undoubtedly save time and money, you should also look at what happens after the product is developed and in production.
Are you aware that, 47% of users won’t tolerate a website taking longer than 2 seconds to load?
And that a staggering 88% of online users won’t revisit to a website where they’ve had a poor experience?
These statistics translate into tangible losses in clientele and revenue. In fact, websites with slow loading speeds cost retailers a staggering $2.6 billion in lost sales annually.
Knowing how we could avoid being part of these statistics is crucial. In this article, I’ll make a brief explanation on what is shift right testing, including its types and benefits.
Table of Contents
- What is Shift Right Testing?
- What types of shift right testing do exist?
- What are the benefits of Shift Right Testing?
- Shift Left, Shift Right, or Both?
What is Shift Right Testing?
Shift right testing means conducting testing, quality assessments, and performance evaluations directly within live production environments.
This approach ensures that applications can handle real user loads while maintaining high quality. Every team should use shift right methods to verify the performance, resilience, and reliability of built applications.
The goal is to catch and fix issues that might slip through during development.
By incorporating these techniques, organizations can extend shift-right testing to configuration and field monitoring, improving testing coverage and user experience.
This concept proves highly beneficial for organizations embracing progressive delivery. Here, developers release new software features gradually to mitigate the impact of unforeseen issues.
What types of shift right testing do exist?
Shift right testing encompasses various test suites tailored to specific needs:
- A/B Testing: Compares user responses to different versions of a page for optimization.
- Synthetic monitoring: Replicates user engagement scenarios to assess application performance. It uses scripts to generate simulated user behavior for various scenarios, geographic locations, device types, and other variables.
- Chaos Engineering: Intentionally induces errors to assess application resilience in controlled environments.
- Canary Releases: Gradually rolls out changes to minimize downtime and facilitate rapid rollback if necessary.
- Blue-Green Deployment: Runs parallel production environments for seamless transitions between versions.
- Production Monitoring: Closely monitoring the production environment to swiftly identify any issues or anomalies, gaining insights into system behavior, performance, and user interactions. This enables real-time detection and resolution of potential problems.
What are the benefits of Shift Right Testing?
- Enhanced Automation: Tests like performance test and canary tests streamline automation, optimizing time and effort in DevOps for smoother feature releases and improved team productivity.
- Improved User Experiences: Beyond mere feedback collection, shift right testing swiftly translates insights into software enhancements, boosting technical performance and business value by addressing user concerns promptly.
- Broadened Test Coverage: Moving beyond software release phases, shift right testing extends test coverage into production, minimizing bugs and ensuring a smoother user experience.
- Data-Driven Insights: Monitoring user behavior provides invaluable insights for future projects, guiding tailored strategies and test designs based on real-world user preferences.
Additionally, it enables prioritization of features based on user preferences, optimizing resource allocation for enhanced software relevance and satisfaction.
Shift Left, Shift Right, or Both?
When modernizing application infrastructures with cloud-native technologies like microservices and containers, it’s becoming increasingly essential for organizations to embrace a dual strategy: both shift left and shift right testing.
While shift left focuses on minimizing software defects and hastening time-to-market, shift right ensures the reliability of applications in live production environments, where it matters most for end-users.
This approach propels organizations towards the ultimate goal of continuous integration and delivery, driven by automation and collaboration across disciplines, resulting in heightened agility and efficiency.
A pivotal component for enabling comprehensive shift left and shift right testing lies in automated full-stack observability and monitoring.
This empowers DevOps teams to meticulously track and analyze all requests and processes across various development stages, thus paving the way for sustainable innovation and success.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article!
My name is João Coelho, and I am currently a QA Automation Engineer at Talkdesk. Lately, I have been writing articles regarding automation, QA and software engineering topics, that might not be known by the community.
If you want to follow my work, check my Linkedin and my author profile at Medium!
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