Level up the testing strategy like a pro

IT industry is experiencing rapid growth and popularity among different domains. As a result, professionals in the field are continually seeking new ways to improve and expand their knowledge base to provide more personalized experience. In this dynamic landscape more and more new proposed approaches and methodologies emerge and shift from theoretical to “learn from experience”. Furthermore, the IT industry advocates for a mindset of frequent adaptation to change.

So staying stagnant is not an option. The ability to embrace and adapt to change is crucial for every project that want to be success and winner in a compete. And investing into digital transformation helps to achieve it.

By analyzing the diagram provided, it is evident that the current trends and sources of inspiration for a digital transformation strategy are apparent. However, the ultimate objective remains unchanged, which is to achieve desired success. To accomplish this, IT professionals need to explore avenues for accelerating processes and making room for intelligent automation in their job roles.

There are four areas to be consider when you start to think of what should be the next step to pursue for a change.

Shift Left has been a long-standing focus in agile projects, emphasizing the early integration of testing activities into the development process (Test Driven Development, Behavior Driven Development, Acceptance Test Driven Development, PACT testing etc.). However this concept also evolve through the time and software testing goals have:

• shifted from “Finding defects” to “Preventing defects”, and now to “Predicting defects”;
• replaced centralized QA by Team shared responsibilities to promote Full stack testing at early stage (functional and non functional testing);
• test data automation with production like set up instead of synthetic data;
• encapsulated DevOps within the concept of QAOps.

The perception may be that implementing this approach requires a significant amount of time and results in an increase in person-days to achieve it. However, the outcome largely depends on the chosen approach. This is where Shift Deep comes into play, helping to streamline and save time in the process.

More and more tools offer AI and ML features which start to play a significant role in test automation by enabling intelligent test and test data generation. It more accessible to a broader range of users by introducing code-less approach, adaptive test execution, and intelligent analysis of test results. Very soon Shift Deep ideas can certainly replace many tools and processes. However it cannot replace the invaluable contributions, expertise and contextual understanding of real people in the software engineering field (Shift Right will cover this). The concept of automating routine tasks persists to reduce workload for software engineers so they can bring creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills that are essential for driving innovation and pushing the industry forward. That’s why automation is no longer “optional” it’s a necessity in today’s fast-paced and competitive landscape. For example, AI tools can perform analysis of historical regression execution results and suggest most critical functional areas for the next execution, indicate outdated or ineffective test cases, identify nature of root cause for failures etc.

Of course modern tools are powerful however as I mentioned above human involvement remains crucial for real-world validation, maintain user centric aspects, continuous improvement, addressing edge cases and unpredictable scenarios, and applying domain expertise etc. That’s where Shift Right approach logs into the game. Testing in production and gathering real-time feedback continuously improve the quality of software. For example, monitoring production application logs and metrics gives you input for better load/stress test cases and opportunities to tune the environment or rework systems configuration to improve performance. So if you are not doing production testing yet it’s time to think about it, engage business users into this idea and explore what can be automated.

Overall any idea of digitalization should be supported by organization for implementation — provide tools, environment, resources, time, budget. That’s where Shift Top will play the main role to promote digital culture. The more flexible the top management is, the greater the chances for success. Agile maturity on different organizational level allows for adaptability, innovation, and the ability to respond effectively to changing market dynamics and challenges. It enables swift decision-making, the ability to pivot strategies when needed, and the willingness to embrace new ideas and approaches.

The concepts of Shift-Left-Deep-Right-Top are closely connected. They may work out individually but it will take longer time to achieve desire results or could fail due to lack of support or tools availability. So it would be much more beneficial to to combine these concepts and level up the strategy with positive outcomes, for example:

• Shift Left with Shift Deep — integrate AI into development or testing phase like code review and code enhancements, UI design mock-ups creation, regression suite prediction, test scripts generation etc.
• Shift Top with Shift Right to ensure all necessary tools are available and business aligned to the approach — budget is obtained and tools are approved to implement automated build, test and deployment processes to enable continuous integration and delivery, ensuring fast and reliable software releases, effective collaboration and communication is established among different teams and stakeholders, fostering a culture of transparency, trust, and shared responsibility etc.

When combined, all these can create powerful synergies and enhance overall business performance, successful organizational growth and transformation and ultimate end goal — desired success.