Shift Left Testing and How QA Can Contribute to a Project
by Kushan Amarasiri
Software Quality Assurance Specialist
Shift Left Testing and How QA Can Contribute to a Project
QA testing the requirements - The QA of a project can first start by going through the requirements and ensure that the requirements are valid and accurate. In an agile environment the QA can validate the user stories and the accuracy of the acceptance criteria. They can contact the stakeholders and customers and check for the accuracy of the given requirements.
Using the approach of TDD - Test driven development as its name suggest, is where QA starts test automation at the early stages, where QA can create mockup test scripts creating arbitrary elements for the given UI elements, until the full-scale UI arrives. Initially the test will fail at the early stages of development, but ultimate goal is to make scripts pass when the functionality evolves.
QA using the existing test automation suite integrated to the CI/CD pipeline. When the existing test automation suite works in a build pipeline, the automated regression suite can be used to detect bugs early, as an when the new code bits are pushed to the source control.
Web Services test automation - The QA team can engage on Web Services first as the web services are the ones which are developed first in the project. So the team can engage on web services testing and test automation, since UI will delivered later and most of the bugs can be discovered at web services testing phase.
Test team can implement white box testing and writing unit test - Another approach for shift left testing is to use white box testing where testers go through the code and identify the defects. Also, QA can be involved to create unit test and script in a unit test environment, where we automate the testing of code written.
