Shift Right Testing: Know its Benefits, Types, and Tools

OVERVIEW

Shift right testing is a testing approach carried out to the right in the development lifecycle. This approach prioritizes early and continuous testing to identify and resolve issues sooner, resulting in shorter development cycles and higher software quality.

The quest for excellence in quality assurance and testing methodologies is never-ending in the changing software development environment. As product owners, delivering a top-notch product with flawless functionality, an amazing user experience, and continuous services is challenging. During this process, some problems can occur. The best way to ensure the software's reliability is to do thorough testing.

Shift left and shift right have become essential testing ideas since software development introduced Agile and DevOps approaches. While the concept of shift left has long been a popular trend in continuous testing techniques, shift right practices are now becoming more common.

This strategy focuses on constantly testing with users in mind, and it's a significant change in how we try things. In this tutorial, we will look into what shift right testing is, why it's essential, and how it's used in today's software development.

What is Shift Right Testing?

Shift right testing is a modern way of testing software that focuses more on the later stages of development. Traditionally, testing took place mainly in the early phases of development, called shift left testing. However, with the Agile development methodologies and continuous integration, testing is now integrated throughout the development process.

In shift right testing, the software is tested in real-world situations, in production or production-like environments. This helps us understand how the software works in practical scenarios. By doing this, we can find and fix issues that might not appear in earlier development stages.

Additionally, shift right testing involves real users. By including them in the testing process, software professionals gather valuable feedback about how they use the software. This helps us make decisions about future improvements.

In simple terms, shift right testing focuses on continuous monitoring and improvement throughout all phases of development. This approach brings many benefits, like better product quality, faster time to release, and an improved user experience.

Shift right testing is a modern approach focusing on testing activities later in the development cycle, during or after deployment. Let's look into some benefits of this methodology in the following section.

Why is Shift Right Testing Important?

Organizations must overcome their fear of chaos/reliability testing in production concerning the appearance of large-scale, mission-critical applications with complicated architectures and separating many features and services into manageable chunks.

Here are a few reasons why testing in the later stages is essential:

• Test in the environment that matters

Lower environments often have configurations, infrastructure, component setups, and deployments different from production environments. Making a lower environment that is an identical reproduction of the production may not always be possible.

Teams can perform shift right testing in a controlled way in the real production setting. Systems might react differently based on the environment and how users interact with them. Dealing with potential issues in this way also helps enhance the overall user experience.

• Test against actual user experience and behaviors

Testing in lower environments often involves generating artificial loads to mimic traffic. However, this approach may not effectively capture diverse user experiences and simulate real user behavior. While synthetic testing can help to some extent, replicating the exact user journey or behavior remains a challenging task.

• Identify the worst-case scenarios

When testing your application in production, it's crucial to be well-prepared to prevent malfunctions. Avoiding the risk of production environment failure pushes you to explore new scenarios and uncover potential issues you might not have considered. Shift right testing helps you prepare for worst-case scenarios, reducing the likelihood of failures from occurring in the first place.

Carrying out traditional testing in lower environments may not exactly replicate the complexities of the actual production setting, leading to potential issues that only appear in real-world usage.

Simulating various user behaviors and identifying worst-case scenarios also becomes difficult in controlled testing environments.

The best way to overcome this challenge is to test under real user conditions involving real browsers and operating systems. One such platform that offers a real device cloud with a wide array of devices and platforms is LambdaTest.

LambdaTest is an AI-based test orchestration and execution platform that addresses the limitations of traditional testing methods by providing a platform for executing tests in real production settings. It helps ensure the software is thoroughly tested against the real user experience.

Watch this video tutorial on performing real-time browser testing on LambdaTest.

Subscribe to our LambdaTest YouTube Channel for the latest updates on tutorials around Selenium testing, Cypress testing, and Parallel testing.

Benefits of Shift Right Testing

Shift right testing offers a strategic shift towards testing in production or production-like environments, providing various benefits. Let's look into the benefits that this approach offers.

• Early problem detection

This approach helps find issues early, even before users notice them, helping solve potential issues before they affect users.

• Realistic user testing

This helps simulate how real users use the software, helping find issues related to user experience and performance that might not have been identified in earlier tests.

• Continuous feedback loop

The continuous feedback loop occurs between developers and the operations team; this feedback allows for quick adjustments, making the development process more agile.

• Test coverage

This approach complements traditional testing methods by including real production settings. It helps identify the issues related to scalability, reliability, and compatibility.

• Enhanced monitoring

This helps identify issues caused by performance, security vulnerabilities, and other operational concerns, helping build a stable system.

• Customers first

This shift right testing focuses on what the customer wants. Ensuring the software meets the requirements and gives the user a good experience.

Now that we are well aware of the benefits of shift right testing. In the next section, let us dive deep into the types of shift right testing.

Shift Left vs. Shift Right Testing

Shift left testing starts before any code is written throughout the development cycle. This kind of testing shortens the time between writing code and discovering errors. Shift left testing seeks to identify errors and quickly minimize their correction cost.

Shift right testing is the method of testing carried out later in the development cycle, following the product's launch. This kind of testing focuses on confirming functionality and usability as well as identifying and fixing problems that customers have raised. Before releasing updates, shift right testing strives to enhance the user experience and guarantee the product is bug-free.

Listed below are some of the key differences in each approach.

As you can see, each shift—left or right—has advantages and disadvantages. Agile development teams can use the former to facilitate implementations, lower costs, and accelerate issue fixes. However, shift right testing is equally important since it allows for the fusion of system and user feedback based on real-world events. Therefore, the question is not which method is best for your business but how to combine the two for the best results.

Future of Testing - Shift left, Shift right, or both?

Given that each has a specific function and can complement the other, "shift left" and "shift right" testing methodologies will be used in software testing in the future. Let's quickly see how these two approaches might develop.

Future Trends of Shift Left Testing

Increased automation, including testing tools powered by AI and machine learning, which may help create test cases and spot possible problems early in the development process, will be a part of shift left testing in the future. Shift left testing will continue to be supported by DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) techniques.

Future Trends of Shift Right Testing

Testing practices and test cases that account for actual user behavior and feedback will be given more contemplation. This strategy uses beta testing, real-time monitoring during production, and usability testing techniques.

Often referred to as "Shift Left and Right," these two testing strategies can give a comprehensive overview of software quality over the whole software development life cycle. Here are some crucial ideas for testing in the future:

• Integration of Shift Left and Right Strategies

To enhance software quality, organizations are increasingly adopting a blended testing approach. For instance, issues identified in production (shift right) can contribute to improving test cases and testing procedures for future releases (shift left).

• Continuous testing

In the future, CI/CD pipelines will be used to perform automation and integration testing, and software quality will be regularly evaluated at every level of development.

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation

AI and automation will be widely used in testing. Predictive analytics, autonomous testing bots, and AI-driven test generation will grow in popularity.

• User-centric testing

More consideration will be given to testing approaches and test cases influenced by real user behavior and feedback. Usability testing, beta testing, and in-production real-time monitoring are the techniques this strategy uses.

For producing high-quality software, testing will require a dynamic and adaptable strategy that blends shift left and shift right tactics. How these strategies are specifically balanced will depend on the program's nature, how it was developed, and how the end user's needs change over time.

Types of Shift Right Testing

Various types of testing play a vital role in ensuring the quality of software products. The types of testing that we will discover below are positioned later in the development process, allowing for a deeper analysis of the software's performance, functionality, and user experience.

Each of the shift right testing types serves a specific purpose that helps improve the software quality.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a method of targeted experimentation where different component iterations (web page, page element, etc.) are simultaneously exposed to different groups of website visitors to determine which version has the biggest impact and affects the business metrics.

It takes all the guesswork out of website optimization and enables the optimizers to experience the ability to make data-driven assessments. In A/B testing, the original version is called "A," and the new one is "B."

The "winner" is the version that makes your business better. If the new version wins, you can use its good ideas on your website.

Every website has its own goals. For example, an online store might want to sell more products, while a business-to-business (B2B) site might want more qualified leads.

A/B testing is important for improving websites and helps you learn about your visitors. It enables you to find out what they like, how much they engage with your site, and if there are any problems.

Many organizations need the opportunity to optimize their websites effectively and make data-driven decisions due to the absence of A/B testing in their web development and optimization strategies. If you're not doing A/B testing, you might miss out on improving your business.

Canary Releases

Using a canary when hazardous gas concentrations became dangerous in coal mines was the basis for the canary release technique. We are using a similar idea for software updates - a canary release.

In a canary release, we first try out changes on a small group of users, just like sending a few canaries into the mine. The system is then closely inspected for indications of a problem using both operational indicators and key performance indicators. You can roll out the modifications to remaining users in subsequent releases or all at once once you're certain your changes haven't negatively impacted functionality, performance, or security.

Those first users are like our canaries - if something goes wrong, it only affects them. This way, the majority of users are safe and unaware. Canary releases are beneficial when dealing with risky changes that can't be tested enough in safe environments.

Chaos Testing

It's sometimes crucial to confirm how the live application responds to unforeseen events in the real world. This is helpful to see if the application can gracefully handle issues and double-check the efficacy of your incident response processes and tools.

Shift right testing may be very useful in situations like chaos engineering, a common method for performing this kind of testing and involves creating issues with a live application.

Chaos testing assesses a system's strength and robustness by purposefully introducing failure scenarios in a production environment. Finding potential flaws and enhancing a system's overall reliability are important practices.

As you start doing chaos testing in production, you must plan to ensure a successful test run. An operational checklist that will assist you in your preparation to perform chaos testing is provided below:

• Notify the appropriate teams, including the monitoring, infrastructure, and incident response teams.
• Ensure the recovery Standard Operational Procedure (SOP) is current and in place.
• Give a team member permission to perform the test.
• Repeatedly validate the test in a non-production setting.
• Plan a time for the test, preferably away from busy times.
• If something unexpected happens and the system goes down, the team is ready to handle it.
• Ensure you turn on and closely monitor your Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
• Make sure the system is brought back to a stable state.

Dark Launching

A new feature is "dark launched" when released but unavailable to all front-end users. This method is excellent for two reasons.

• Initially, it enables you to test a new feature on a select group of consumers. As a result, you can do A/B testing to determine whether the component performs as expected and is well-liked.
• Additionally, it helps us see how the feature performs in a real environment. Having actual users interact with the feature is the best way to test and understand its effectiveness.

The most straightforward approach to dark launch a new feature on a page in a straightforward online application is to duplicate the page and give it a different name, such as../gitpage.html ../gitpage2.html. Then you can push both the updated page and the new page.

In this manner, only those chosen users can access the new version.

The benefit of this strategy is that the new and old codes are kept apart. When it's time to make the new version public, you can delete the old page and rename the new one, taking it out of "dark launch mode."

The dark launch strategy has its drawbacks.

• Because the two sites are distinct, any common bugs must be patched twice if both pages are kept "live" for a long period.
• Even worse, because the old page now has a new URL, links from other pages in the app will still point to it, making it tricky to assess cross-page flows.

Feature Toggles

Consider feature toggles as the solution to these drawbacks of dark launching. At its most basic level, a feature toggle is a method to provide the program additional context and then modify how it behaves based on that context.

For instance, you can use the previous behavior and the new feature to dark start the feature in a web application. You can then test a feature toggle on the page to determine which one the user will see. This method often results in more complex code, but it also means that errors in common code only need to be repaired once. Furthermore, the same URL now offers both the old and new behavior.

Software Fault Injection Testing

Software Fault Injection introduces errors intentionally into a software system to test its strength in situations. It is a method of stress testing, sometimes known as monkey testingmonkey testing. The program injects errors that cause unexpected events, watching how the software reacts to the occurrences and making the necessary modifications.

Fault-Error-Failure cycle is the mechanism upon which Software Fault Injection operates. The following steps make up the cycle.

• Fault: Either at compile time or during runtime, faults (adjusted or hypothesized) are introduced into the code.
• Error: When the faults are activated, they cause several errors and alter the software's state to one that is not desirable.
• Failure: The undesirable situation brought on by numerous faults that lead the software to fail. For instance, a service interruption.

Shift right testing is complemented by the Fault Injection approach to increase the performance and strength of software. Regular testing techniques verify the software's correct behavior, whereas fault injection measures the software's correct behavior while purposefully injecting defects.

Ensuring the software being developed works as expected based on given requirements is essential. Identifying and fixing issues via testing is how software can improve and enhance user experience.

User Feedback Collection

Shift right testing relies on user feedback and gathering performance data. Actively seeking input through feedback forms or user surveys helps organizations understand user experiences, find pain points, and discover areas for improvement. Performance data, including logs, measurements, and usage patterns, gives organizations plenty of information to analyze and enhance their software continuously.

How do you Perform Shift Right Testing?

Organizations should consider the following actions to conduct shift right testing successfully.

• Determine the Need

What are your goals for shift right testing? Are you trying to enhance the user experience, reliability, scalability, performance, or security? Determine the stage in your software development or deployment process where shift right testing is most effective. Decide which crucial metrics, such as user behavior, application performance, and error rates, must be evaluated in the production environment.

• Choose the right testing methods

Pick the appropriate testing methods for shift-right. You have various options like canary releases, A/B testing, synthetic monitoring, chaos testing, and gathering user feedback. Choose the methods that align with your goals and are most suitable for your software.

• Make a test plan

After deciding on your testing strategies, you must create a plan for how you will execute them. The following questions should be addressed in this plan:

• What data will you collect?
• How will you assess the data?
• How will you identify issues and address them?
• Set up the test environment

Make sure your test environment closely resembles the production setup. This could involve loading balancers, staging servers, and other necessary infrastructure components.

• Monitor and analyze results.

Use strong monitoring tools to get live updates on user activity, application performance, and any possible issues.

Pay attention to the test results. Regularly review the collected data, identify patterns or irregularities, and take necessary actions to solve problems or make enhancements.

• Gather user feedback

Interact with users to learn about their experiences with the system, comprehend their problems, and spot areas that could be improvised.

It is crucial to inform customers about the shift right testing you are carrying out. Doing so will mitigate the risk to users, and feedback on the new release will be gathered.

• Establish testing standards

Outline specific guidelines for shift right testing, including the frequency of tests, the expected results, and the teams in charge of carrying them out.

Here are a few more pointers for beginning shift right testing:

• Start small

Only some things need to be tested simultaneously. Start by testing only a small component of your software, then gradually broaden it as you go.

• Use automation

You may scale up your shift right testing efforts and lower the possibility of human error by using automation.

• Get buy-in from stakeholders

Before you begin with shift right testing, it's crucial to acquire the support of stakeholders. This will make it more likely that you will have the required tools and assistance.

Planning the test cases and giving feedback to monitor the test failure results for various test scenarios can be challenging for QA testers. However, with the advancement of technology, service platforms like LambdaTest can resolve this challenge and help improve the efficiency of QA testers.

One notable feature of LambdaTest is test failure analysis, which helps QA testers carefully analyze the test results and pinpoint the exact step and condition that led to the failure. This feature also offers detailed logs, screenshots, and video recordings of the test execution and helps find the root cause quickly.

Now that we have explored the difference between shift left and shift right let us look into the challenges software developers and testers face when using shift right testing with solutions in the following section.

Tools Used for Shift Right Testing

To catch issues that might not be apparent in earlier testing stages. Here are some tools commonly used for shift right testing:

• Application performance monitoring (APM) tools

Used to track the activity of running applications to spot performance problems.

Examples: AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and New Relic.

• Log analysis tools

These can be used to extract useful information from logs and identify the main reason for any system errors.

Examples: Splunk, Graylog, and ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana).

• User analytics tools

Can be used to direct UX improvement attempts by helping gather information about user activity and understand user preferences.

Examples: Mixpanel, Google Analytics, and Amplitude.

• Feedback collection tools

Gather user input to learn more about their experiences and make the required changes.

Examples: UserVoice, Zendesk, and Intercom.

Challenges of Shift Right Testing

Shift right testing has become a vital methodology to improve the reliability and efficacy of applications. Even though it has many advantages, such as increased customer satisfaction and a shorter time to market, teams still face obstacles while adopting shift right testing.

Let's talk about solutions for these obstacles.

Challenge 1: Mindset change and cultural resistance

A big challenge with shift right testing is that many organizations are used to testing early in development (Shift Left Testing). Shifting right means testing later, during production, or after product release. This shift requires a significant change in mindset.

Solution

Organizations must invest in educational and training initiatives to overcome this issue to help teams comprehend the advantages of shift right testing. The need for continuous testing and monitoring throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) must be emphasized by leaders as they support this cultural transition.

Challenge 2: Complicated software environments

Modern software programs are often used in complex and diverse situations. They interact with many components, run on different platforms, and use various technologies. Coordinating testing across such a broad environment can be challenging.

Solution

Organizations should invest in containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to solve this problem. By assisting in creating uniform testing environments, these technologies can facilitate the simpler replication of errors across several platforms. Scripts for automation testing should also be flexible enough to accommodate different configurations.

Challenge 3: Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) compatibility

Shift right testing's integration with CI/CD pipelines should be smooth. However, ensuring that testing keeps up with the quick-paced nature of CI/CD can be difficult and may result in release process bottlenecks.

Solution

Teams should incorporate automated testing into their CI/CD workflows. Code changes can immediately start automated testing, such as smoke tests and canary releases. This ensures that testing is not a separate step from deployment but a crucial component. Using LambdaTest to carry out your automation testing can be beneficial; this platform also provides smooth integration with CI/CD tools. To know more, follow the LambdaTest integration with CI/CD tools support documentation to understand how to maintain continuous code change and perform testing effectively based on code changes in development.

Challenge 4: Data security and privacy Issues

As businesses progress, testing often involves using real user data in live environments. This raises important data privacy and security concerns, especially with laws like GDPR and CCPA.

Solution

To keep sensitive data safe during testing, organizations should prioritize anonymizing data. This can be achieved using artificial data or techniques that hide and anonymize personal information.

Challenge 5: Mechanisms for monitoring and feedback

Shift right testing primarily relies on robust monitoring and feedback systems to quickly identify problems in production. To implement appropriate monitoring tools and methods, application performance and user behavior must be thoroughly understood.

Solution

Businesses should spend money on extensive automation and monitoring systems. These technologies can monitor an application's performance, gather user input, and offer immediate insights into potential problems. Teams should also define precise procedures for examining and acting on this data.

Challenge 6: Shift Left to Shift Right transition

Achieving a smooth changeover between the Shift Left and Shift Right testing phases is crucial. Inconsistencies between these stages can lead to overlooked vulnerabilities or delayed issue discovery.

Solution

Establish transparent routes for cooperation and communication between the development and operations teams. The smooth and coordinated transition from development to production can be made possible through continuous integration and feedback loops.

Challenge 7: Cost management

Shifting right testing might increase costs, especially for infrastructure, staff, and monitoring tools. Businesses must balance improved software quality benefits with the associated expenses.

Solution: Conduct a cost-benefit analysis to identify the ideal degree of investment in shift right testing. When assessing the expenditures, consider the possible income advantages from increased customer satisfaction and fewer post-release concerns.

Challenges 8: Impact of user experience

The user experience can occasionally be impacted by testing in production. Unexpected problems might result in service interruptions or performance degradation, which may jeopardize the reputation of the application and the organization.

Solution

Use feature flags and canary releases only to make new code available to a select group of users. This enables teams to monitor the impact of changes on a more limited basis before deploying them across the entire customer base.

Challenge 9: Time and resource limitations

Shifting right in testing can demand a lot of labor and resources, needing additional facilities, equipment, and employees. Allocating time and resources for thorough testing can be challenging in fast-paced development environments.

Solution

Organizations should prioritize testing based on risk. Critical features and components need more thorough testing compared to less crucial areas. Automation can optimize resource usage to reduce the manual testing workload.

Now that we have seen the challenges with solutions, let us discover some best practices for shift right testing in the following section.

Best Practices for Shift Right Testing

Modern software development emphasizes continuous monitoring and testing of software in its production context, which is not complete without shift right testing. It's essential to adhere to best practices to guarantee the efficacy of this methodology. Following are some essential best practices:

• Use Tools for continuous monitoring

Start by putting in place reliable monitoring technologies that offer in-the-moment perceptions of the operation of your program, including infrastructure, application, and user behavior metrics.

Prometheus, Grafana, and New Relic are a few well-liked monitoring tools.

• Establish clear objectives

The goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) should be detailed. Recognize the metrics you want to track and what acceptable performance and quality standards are. This will direct the tests you do.

• Schedule complete testing life cycle.

The software's goal, functionality, requirements, and technologies will determine which testing approaches can be used for shift right testing.

Early testing makes sense since finding bugs early for some functions and features may be useful. Some features may encounter problems during or after distribution; thus, planning is required. Developing a thorough and realistic understanding of the needs, goals, constraints, and approach is strongly advised.

• Incorporate testing into the project management process

The lack of proper testing strategy selection is one of the key causes of software application failure. It can result in poor results when test engineers are not included in critical phases like the idea and project launch phases.

The QA team has to be involved in all phases of development. The critical task of bridging the divide between these teams falls to project management. Integrating the testing and development teams should be seamless and mutually beneficial. It may determine whether the software application is successful or not.

• Automate monitoring and alerting

Install automated monitoring and alerting systems to alert your team to any departures from expected behavior or set criteria. It ensures you can respond quickly to problems when they arise.

• Utilise real user data

Real user data should be collected and analyzed for shift right testing. Monitor user interactions, behaviors, and patterns to see how your program is utilized and potential trouble spots.

• Accept A/B testing

Use A/B testing to evaluate the effectiveness of various software configurations or versions in a real-world setting. It can assist you in determining which improvements increase customer happiness and which could have adverse effects.

Conclusion

The goal of quality assurance (QA) for software products, services, and diverse applications is to achieve quality throughout the entire application lifecycle. Testing methodologies must advance as firms go digital. Increased testing, testing conducted earlier, and wider testing are all favorable for a well-rounded product.

Even if a company sells physical goods, it still needs to be concerned about the digital connection and the impression it makes on its customers. For companies to ensure digital assurance, it is ultimately necessary to integrate testing into the application lifecycle process from the beginning and modify test cases in response to user feedback.

By implementing the best practices discussed in this article, companies can leverage Shift Right Testing to its fullest potential, ultimately leading to improved software quality and a seamless user experience.