Faster time-to-market of the new features and upgrades is prioritized by companies for quicker adaptation to market dynamics, improved revenues and competitive advantage. One of the key building blocks of such an initiative is assuring the right quality continuously. This needs shift-left thinking.
Shift-left thinking
Shift-left thinking focuses on Early issue detection and late surprises in the software development life cycle. TechMojo embraced such an approach by taking a 360-degree view of software development and making stakeholders like Quality, DevOps, SRE, and Security integral parts of the process, starting the design phase. This ensured the product was hardened enough and qualified to reduce the gap between application development, quality certification, and production deployment. Also rewarding has been lesser chaos and coordination challenges later in the cycle and higher levels of collaboration and ownership. Tools like Cucumber for Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) have been effective in complementing shift-left thinking by enabling alignment between development, quality teams, and product managers.
Automation for shorter product release cycles and better assurance
At TechMojo test automation has proven to be almost a panacea and one of the initiatives with high ROI, that a client CTO can confidently place his bet on, to improve outcomes and agility of delivery. Test automation aligns well with shift-left approach as test automation experts align early in cycle and start developing suite along side the development. TechMojo’s experience has been that automation proved to be effective not just for feature test sign off in QA phase but also more importantly for assuring quality when the feature is released to production. Apart from quality assurance its value in shrinking time to production has been significant as every features automated improves the regression confidence and shrinks regression time.
TechMojo’s innovative approach to staffing automation teams meant some of developers in the agile pod take turns at the role of test automation engineers and this improved the quality of test automation also significantly.