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Blog - Shifting Testing to the Left Improves SDLC Efficiency

Shifting Testing to the Left Improves SDLC Efficiency

‘Shift-left testing’ moves a significant portion of your QA testing effort to earlier in the SDLC, often during — rather than after — the critical stages of system design and development. Whether your software development method is Agile, continuous, waterfall or any combination of these, testing early means improving the efficiency and productivity of your SDLC.

With this increased efficiency, teams can:

  • Push features into customers’ hands faster
  • Improve software application quality
  • Reduce the QA testing execution time
  • Reduce time spent performing re-work and defect corrections at the end of the SDLC

Read on to learn how to improve your software team’s SDLC efficiency by moving testing to the left.

Building a Continuous Feedback Loop

Testing can become a bottleneck when it is only conducted after the design and development phases have been completed. When testing finds an unexpected bug late in the SDLC, it can require teams to rework designs, coding and additional testing. This ‘re-work’ is a drain on time and money, and can demoralize team members who already committed so much effort to a release, and now have to revert back to it weeks or months later.

Testing can become a bottleneck when it is only conducted after the design and development phases have been completed.

What are some best practices and benefits from moving a large portion of your testing to earlier in the SDLC?

First, invite the QA testers to all design discussions and reviews, and make them part of the development discussion. This will give them the opportunity to identify potential trouble spots, and missed business cases early in the process. In some scenarios, the QA testers are the ones who think most like a user, so they can bring value to this stage.

In addition, increase unit test coverage created by developers, and have your testers learn to execute and edit unit test scripts for updates. With experienced developers building unit and component testing into tools that use code they’re familiar with, the only training required is teaching your QA testers enough coding skills to be able to edit existing code.

With these process changes, your QA testers are involved early and develop a solid understanding of both the business intent of the software and the requirements the customer is requesting. At this point, your QA testers can create a full list of expected user workflows as well as unit test validation conditions.

With shift-left testing, your feedback loop for improvements spans the entire development cycle, rather than being concentrated near the end. Granted, during a traditional lifecycle, you will still get feedback from developers when questions arise during coding, but the bulk of the product review — with a customer in mind — occurs closer to the end. By moving testing up, you’ve increased feedback up front and reduced churn at the end.

Test Automation – Build it First, Not After the Fact

Test automation makes shift-left testing possible and builds collaboration between development and QA. However, test automation is often not leveraged properly or fully to shift testing left. Consider these statistics from a State of Testing Report:

  • 74% of QA testers see test automation and scripting as a task they perform outside of the test execution cycle
  • 45% of software organizations use test automation for unit tests, and only 50% use if for CI/CD

Test automation projects succeed more often when experienced coders create the automation, and QA testers edit (maintain), monitor and execute it. Why? Because test automation shouldn’t be done outside the testing cycle. If you leave it as an extra QA task, there will never be time to complete it, and the test automation project stalls.

Test automation projects succeed more often when experienced coders create the automation, and QA testers edit (maintain), monitor and execute it.

Developing scripted test automation for end-to-end or complex functional regression test scenarios is extremely difficult to develop, let alone maintain. One way to develop the scripts is to team up a developer with coding experience and a tester who is familiar with finding defects in anticipated customer workflows, but that still leaves issues with maintaining those automated regression scripts.

Moving test development, including development of the automation test suite, to the beginning of the cycle builds three critical items for software application success, in both the long and short term:

  • Automated unit tests
  • Integrated component & unit tests
  • An integrated, automated regression coverage test suite

Each of these is valuable for both development and QA to ensure the software continues to function as expected and to find defects early. If you release continuously or even frequently, automating your unit, integration and regression test suite is essential to gaining the ability to quickly check that a new code or release is functional before additional testing or coding ensues. Having these coded automation suites is essential for teams to be efficient and productive, and for organizations to continuously release higher-quality software.

Apps targeting young people

Naturally, banks and online brokers are also increasingly offering mobile solutions for stock trading. However, this new group of fintech startups has a different structure than traditional providers. As international apps with social media appeal, they are aimed at a particularly young target group of 25- to 35-year-olds who want not only access to stock trading but also a new kind of user experience. It has become clear that accessibility and user-friendliness are key selling points for these new investment apps. For example, according to Bitkom’s Digital Finance Report 2020, 40% of respondents expressed the expectation that “smartphone apps’ ease of use for stock and securities transactions will enable more people to benefit from companies’ performances.”

In a nutshell, the easy access via smartphones makes these “neobrokers” so appealing. Clear design, community integration, and ease of entry has turned UI/UX into an actual product.

Special opportunities – special risks?

Many apps have little to no limit on how small a trade can be, making it possible to buy fractional shares. As mentioned, they charge very low fees — or none at all — and are available outside of regular trading hours. The apps clearly aim to lower the entry threshold for stock trading, and sometimes lure new users with free shares. On the flip side, the apps offer no or minimal investing advice, unlike traditional brokers. Consequently, purchasers must do their own research outside of the app, using articles, forums and social media. This aspect has raised suspicions in the German market. In the survey undertaken for the Bitkom Digital Finance Report referenced above, 69% of respondents stated that “an advisor’s input is absolutely key to making good investment decisions.” As a result, the separation of professional advisory services and the gamification of trading stocks carries certain risks, especially for inexperienced users.

Too much power?

The potential dynamics unleashed by direct market access were demonstrated in an interesting case study in January. Small investors coordinated a purchase of GameStop stock via Reddit to prevent a decline in the company’s value, on which hedge funds had speculated. In fact, the Reddit community’s actions were so successful that U.S. authorities are now investigating the possibility of market manipulation. Outrage erupted, however, when Robinhood simply suspended trading in GameStop shares at the height of the buying frenzy.

Ultimately, the neobroker did have a good reason for halting trading. The security it had deposited with clearinghouse DTCC was insufficient to match increased trading volume. However, this episode illustrates that some luster has fallen from the new market power of small investors: Even trading apps do not eliminate the intermediary function; they only replace it, sometimes with even more opaque conditions than before.

The outlook is promising

And yet, neobrokers are attracting young investors by reinventing the process of investing and stock trading. With pleasing designs and customer experiences geared toward millennials, these apps will be able to gain many users in the next few years. At that point, they will have to show that they can keep up with the momentum that they created. Users expect apps, acting as financial service providers and managers of highly sensitive data, to be error-free at all times and in all places – and rightly so. User trust and compliance with financial rules will play a crucial role in determining whether neobrokers will remain competitive as market penetration continues.

However, the new investment apps’ penetration of the DACH market is still at an early stage. Established providers, especially banking apps, may leverage the trend by incorporating a more attractive UX and simplified investment features into their existing apps. For example, a whitepaper from the Sparkassen Innovation Hub on the topic of changing values recommends “opening up products to small investment amounts” as well as “using a clear, appealing interface (UI), playful elements for data entry and maintenance, [and] the use of status and progress indicators to guide users through processes” to attract a new group of potential investors.

One thing is certain: The phenomenal growth of investment and trading apps, especially in Germany, could be a precursor to interesting developments in the coming years.

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Dan Cagen
Dan Cagen
Former Product Marketing Manager
Published On: October 29, 2020
Reading Time: 5 min
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