Dave Winfield – Vanguard
Adopting a shift left approach to testing can generally be seen as a good approach to dedicating the entire organization to quality of products produced, but does taking testers out of the equation completely run the risk of missing key points in testing? As developers take on more responsibility for testing, what training are they getting to ensure the risk is minimized, how do the approach analysis of the application and is there enough separation between them and the product they are building? What happens to the professional tester when an organization pushes all testing responsibility to the developers?
What does an organization lose by eliminating the professional tester?
The advantage to shift left is that quality, becomes the responsibility of the Product Owner and the Development team preventing the shift right, excuse driven approach that somehow testing was responsible for the quality of the product build by the development team. This elimination of the quality gate forces developers to take full responsibility for the completed product. It means that when the sprint is complete the work is complete, no more waiting for testers to finish finding bugs; no more going onto new work.
But can the testing mindset be integrated into the development? Professional testers are trained to look skeptically at the product, to analyze the requirements for missing connections and the product for ill fitting and unusable interfaces. The analysis of the software has always seemed to be a place for the professional tester but can the developer take on that role too?
This paper will explore the implementation of a fully immersed Shift Left environment and try to answer the questions posed above: will shift left remove the need for the professional tester?
Dave Winfield, 2021 Technical Presentation, Paper
