All businesses want (or should) reduce the risks associated with software development. But for businesses serving safety-critical industries and the financial sector, risk needs to be eliminated as much as possible and minimized in all other cases.

Left-shift testing reduces risk in the following key areas, as detailed below:

• security
• visibility
• Regulatory and OEM compliance
• reliability
• Application of the change
• Outsourcing development

What is “left shift”?

“Moving left” is moving key testing practices to early in the development lifecycle. This term is particularly common in agile, continuous, and DevOps initiatives. So why do you need to perform early software testing?

Many testing activities occur later in the cycle, take longer to identify problems, and cost more to fix. Moving left is about moving defect identification and prevention to an earlier stage. If you don’t do this and wait to perform testing practices later in the development cycle, the non-functional business requirements (that is, security and performance testing) in particular are so ingrained in the code that you have to keep patching rather than fixing them properly. So how does moving testing “to the left” help in key areas of software?

security

Compromised application security can result in information leaks, outages, defacement, and malware installation. According to the Web Hacking Event database, these consequences account for 61.6% of security-related results.

The traditional security approach is to simulate a direct attack through a combination of guesswork and experience. Traditional methods are ineffective and outdated due to an excessive reliance on luck. With left-shift testing, you can avoid these security risks at development time.

visibility

One of the biggest risks an organization faces is the lack of a basis for making decisions. Is the development schedule on time? Does the product meet the requirements? Is there anything that needs to be done now to take advantage of opportunities or mitigate the impact of upcoming customer issues?

Parasoft shift to the left of the test platform by using the data from each software development infrastructure bundled together, and according to the company strategy application context defined intelligence, thus provide organizations with the unprecedented and unparalleled, complete visibility, in order to impel the prevention and control of the automation process, provide the highest level of management required for business intelligence.

Regulatory and OEM compliance

Failure to comply with safety-critical regulations, government or OEM regulations may result in recalls, void contracts, penalties, or legal action. Although total amounts vary by industry and project, they are usually substantial. Through a combination of static analysis, coverage analysis, process definition, and routine measurements, the left-shift testing approach systematizes compliance into an automated, airtight process to ensure risk control.

reliability

Software reliability remains one of the most obvious problems that can be easily solved with left-shift testing. Symptoms of crashes, downtime, and lack of SLAs can seriously affect a company’s position in the market. By combining prevention, detection and verification into a process of continuous improvement, left-shift testing will ensure that reliability risks are reduced or eliminated.

Application of the change

There is an old saying among developers: “If debugging is the process of getting rid of bugs, then development must be the process of putting them in.” In business terms, every code change is a risk.

Left-shift testing eliminates the risk of introducing new defects by implementing coding strategies that prevent structural and design problems as developers work. In addition, a left-shift testing strategy will allow regression tests and detailed coverage analysis to be automatically generated, executed, and managed, eliminating the risk of compromising existing functionality. Automated peer review assignments provide a final layer of risk mitigation to ensure that 100% of the code can be reviewed by the appropriate team experts.

Outsourcing development

Outsourcing is disappearing as companies learn from the risks of cheap, inexperienced Labour in the high-tech sector. However, many companies have active offshore development and test teams and will continue down this path. While strategies vary, successful outsourcers establish multiple risk mitigation thresholds both on-site and off-site to prevent risk injection. Left-shift testing is a natural fit for establishing and enforcing coding standards, unit test coverage, and peer review policies at every risk mitigation gate.

So how do you move to the left?

For brevity, the left-shift test method is divided into two main activities:

Apply development testing best practices

Early development practices, such as static code analysis and unit testing, help find and prevent defects early in the process.

It is important to remember that the goal is not to find bugs, but to reduce the number of bugs (especially those that will be released into the release). In the end, it’s far more valuable and cheaper to create fewer bugs in the first place than to find more. Therefore, a proactive safety-critical coding standard is adopted by flagging code that may be “effective” but still not secure.

Coding standards are software equivalents of engineering standards that are key to reducing the number of errors (in addition to finding them earlier) and supporting and getting the most value out of moving to the left. Coding standards are software engineering knowledge that can help you avoid wrong/dangerous/unsafe code. To use them, you need to apply static code analysis.

For the sake of software security, this is especially important for successfully enhancing software. You want to build security in your code, not test it. Coding standards allow you to build more secure applications from the start (that is, secure by design), which is a good idea if you are subject to requirements such as GDPR.

Use service virtualization for continuous testing

Next, you must accept the tests created at all stages of the development process, including the later stages, and continue to do so. This is critical for teams that adopt agile development practices to provide continuous feedback throughout the development process. Unit tests can easily be executed consecutively, but due to the dependencies of external systems, it is often difficult to move the execution of late functional tests to the left hand, where you can leverage service virtualization for continuous testing.

Service virtualization allows you to simulate related systems where availability may be limited, such as mainframes, access fees, third-party services, or systems that may not be ready. By emulating them, you can perform functional tests without the entire system available, and you can move test execution entirely to the development desktop.

In terms of performance testing, service virtualization allows you to test before everything is ready, without having to fully experiment with everything in your system. You can even run various what-if scenarios, such as what if the application server is running fast and the database is running slow (which is hard to do in the real world). Or, if my server starts throwing interesting errors, such as error 500, how does that affect system performance?

You can push the system as much as you want and implement it as early as possible.

Also, you can start safety testing earlier. Decoupling from the physical system allows you to do something even more interesting, which is to make the simulated system behave in incredible ways. Now, you can actually do security testing… Not only can you view contaminated data and DDoS on the system, but you can also flood the system with packets, sending malformed data or many other ways attackers commonly exploit it. As a result, not only can you test earlier (move to the left), but you can also test more deeply than a test lab or production system.