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Shift Left

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 Engineering Flow

Shift left means moving testing earlier in the development process: test earlier, and test more often. Picture a delivery pipeline drawn left to right. Traditional QA sits at the far right as a bottleneck, catching defects late and sending them back upstream as rework. Shifting left moves that work toward the start, into design and into the building of each story.

The principle has spread well beyond testing. Teams now shift security, accessibility, and operability left too. The mechanism is the same each time: delete the downstream queue and make the people who build the work responsible for its quality while they build it.

The cheapest way we know is to pair a developer and a test engineer on every story and collapse the separate dev, review, and test columns on the board into one.

One team we worked with did exactly that in its dojo challenge, and the change also gave developers a reason to learn the test toolchain, which is how T-shaped skills start. If your board has a “Ready for Test” column, you haven’t shifted left and probably still have downstream activities that can create back pressure on your system.

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