Shifting Out: a crucial dimension to Left and Right
You've heard of 'Shift-Left'—the DevOps principle of moving testing closer to Development with programmatic approaches like Build/Code/Plan/Test pipelines. The other DevOps dimension is 'Shift-Right'—moving testing closer to Production with programmatic approaches like Release/Deploy/Operate/Monitor. But there's a third dimension to these that few people talk about—Shifting OUT—getting perspective so you know how best to marshal your Left and Right resources.
I frame this talk with what I learned over 13 years at eBay as a Quality Program Manager and customer advocate.
- What should happen to a customer bug report? What if the issues should be owned by many teams?
- There are very good reasons we can't find bugs earlier—what are those limitations?
- What signals are you getting from your tests? What tools can be built to understand and process those signals?
If shifting left is being able to find problems earlier, and shifting right is about learning from Production, it's time we had a talk about how we can see not just the Left or the Right 'trees', but zoom out to see the WHOLE forest.
Jon Bach
Jon's been in Tech since 1995, starting in Customer Support for a commercial real estate dial-up service. His most recent role was at eBay where he worked for 13 years as a Quality Director and Program Manager. He was a full-time employee at Microsoft during Y2K, and has served on contracts at HP, Adobe, AT&T, WebMD, Getty Images, Alaska Airlines, McGraw-Hill, and more. He loves trying to turn rhetoric and philosophy about software development into action (baking half-baked ideas), and frequently posts on LinkedIn about these in context of software quality and program management.