How important is the aspect of Cultural Change in Shift left QA

Enterprises are embracing digital transformation to deliver high-quality products and services to their target customers at a faster rate. This is an important step in the right direction as such enterprises are likely to add economic value to the tune of 14 trillion pounds, as per IDC, the market intelligence firm. However, digital transformation needs the application of proper tools, methodologies like DevOps, and a culture change in the organization. A key enabler of digital transformation is the practice of shifting the testing cycle early in the development pipeline aka ‘shift-left’. This shift left approach in DevOps ensures the delivery of security and quality on a continuous basis throughout the SDLC.

Why is shift-left testing important for digital transformation?

In conventional manual testing, applications are tested after development. Since development teams generally get the leeway to work till the eleventh hour, the testing team is given very little time to complete testing. As testers work manually, they get little choice but to adhere to the stringent delivery timelines. This hurried job of testing often results in delivering a substandard product and a bad customer experience. Later, the development teams need to work on the product after customers highlight quality issues resulting in cost escalation.

Today, customer satisfaction has become the number one objective for enterprises and with the presence of defects, achieving this objective gets derailed. Also, if the defects are related to security issues then there is a likelihood of the company attracting heavy penalties, legal suits, and censure. So, if the defects are addressed early in the value chain courtesy the shift left software testing approach, then the resulting damage can be minimized or prevented. All said and done, to let the shift-left approach work and deliver the expected outcomes, every team in the SDLC should be prepared to embody the change. In other words, besides embedding technical practices and the use of advanced tools, it is important to embody the shift-left culture by every team.

As most teams work in a siloed environment, merely prodding from the top and focusing on using automation tools and techniques are not going to deliver results. On the contrary, without embracing the shift-left ‘culture’, teams may face further consolidation of divisions. Hence, it is imperative to drive a cross-organizational culture in favor of the shift left digital transformation strategy. If the cultural and behavioral changes across teams are addressed beforehand, the shift left DevOps strategy has a greater likelihood of succeeding and delivering performance.

How to enable shift-left digital quality assurance

The practices to bring about a shift-left software quality assurance strategy are:

Culture change aligned to the company’s vision: Shift-left aims at empowering a business by embedding the testing process early on in the delivery pipeline. However, for the success of this transformation methodology, it needs buy-in from every stakeholder across the organization. To usher in this change, the first step should be to align everyone to the company’s vision. This will ensure that everyone in the value chain understands the big picture and their role in achieving the vision. For example, everyone should know about questions such as:

• What should we do to deliver the best customer service?
• How to ensure our company remains competitive?
• How is our performance today and what changes are needed going forward?

Teams to pursue a common goal: It has been observed that implementing a shift left QA strategy can significantly improve the company’s performance. The next step is to incentivize and reorganize the teams to break the silos and the resultant inefficiencies. This will drive agility through short iterative cycles across teams. An effective change management program educating teams about how the changes would radically help the company in achieving success can help matters.

Assessment of performance: After aligning the teams around the company’s vision and incentivizing them, the software delivery performance needs to be assessed and evaluated. The metrics to be analyzed in order to categorize performance and identify wastage are – frequency of delivery, change lead time, fix meantime, and change failure rate. Here, the first two metrics evaluate throughput while the other two measure stability. A successful shift left approach should focus on achieving both throughput and stability.

Conclusion

With throughput and stability ensured, the shift left testing in digital transformation should look at implementing key technical practices involving environments, test automation, and behavior-driven development. This would ensure everyone in the value chain works together as a collective entity rather than as individuals.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.