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 Bach has spent 30 years in software development, having worked for start-ups as well as enterprises like Microsoft and eBay where he was voted a “Luminary” employee. He’s now an independent consultant in the Seattle area, hosting meetups like QASIG and PMSIG and helping to organize the 2025 Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference. He’s the creator of Open-Book Testing and co-creator of Session-Based Test Management, and is constantly exploring new ways to be an effective tester and manager.