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The Value of Shift Left Testing: Tools and Solutions
Shift-left testing catches defects earlier in the software development life cycle, enhancing code quality while saving time, resources, and costs associated with rework.
Shift-Left Testing
Traditional Testing Versus Shift-Left Testing
Traditional testing and shift-left testing are different approaches to software development.
Compare the benefits in the table below.
| Aspect | Traditional Testing | Shift-Left Testing |
|---|---|---|
| Agility | Testing occurs after development phases are complete, often in dedicated testing phases. | Testing starts early during development, alongside coding tasks. |
| Bug Detection | Bugs usually identified during late-stage testing. | Bugs caught early in the development process. |
| Costs | The cost of fixing bugs increases exponentially as defects progress from coding to production. | Minimize costs by minimizing rework like redesign, recoding, and retesting. |
| Productivity | Development may slow down due to late-stage bug fixes. | Catching bugs early prevents late-stage fixes, which, in turn, speeds up development. |
| Risk Management | Greater risk of critical issues reaching production. | Reduced risk with early bug detection and mitigation. |
| Quality Assurance | QA concentrates activities in the later stages. | QA involvement starts early, ensuring quality from the outset. |
| Feedback Loop | Development and testing phases often sequential resulting in slow feedback to development. | Development and testing occur concurrently, increasing agility and resulting in faster feedback to development. |
Parasoft's Shift Left Testing Solutions
Streamline your development process, detect errors early, strengthen software safety, security, reliability, and reduce costs with our shift-left testing solutions. Transform your testing workflows and stay ahead in the competitive market.
Save on Development Costs
Teams cut costs associated with late-stage defect resolution and lengthy debugging sessions when they shift left with our static analysis and unit testing solutions.
How It Works
As defects progress from coding to production, the cost of fixing them increases exponentially, often requiring significant rework, including redesign, recoding, and retesting. Late detection of defects can also lead to production issues, necessitating emergency patches and support efforts, which can cause customer dissatisfaction. Teams minimize these costly issues with shift-left testing, particularly through static analysis and unit testing.
Parasoft’s static analysis solutions for C, C++, Java, C#, and .NET integrate seamlessly into common IDEs like VS Code, IntelliJ, Eclipse, and Visual Studio, enabling developers to perform code scans as they write, catching potential issues before they progress further into the development process. Our Continuous Quality Assistant for Java and .NET further automates code scans during active development with continuous feedback. This proactive approach ensures that bugs and vulnerabilities are addressed immediately, reducing the time and resources needed to fix them later.
Additionally, solutions like C/C++test CT integrate with unit testing frameworks like GoogleTest to incorporate code coverage and requirements traceability. C/C++test and Jtest frameworks help teams quickly generate effective unit test suites, further reducing the costs associated with test creation. By implementing a strong unit testing practice, development teams minimize rework, accelerate development cycles, and improve overall software quality.
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C/C++test 
C/C++test CT 
dotTEST 
Jtest 
CASE STUDY
|
Smiths Medical Delivers Safe, High-Quality Medical Devices With Test-Driven Development
"Oftentimes managers fall into this trap where they concentrate on a certain metric, and they expect the metric to be above or below a certain threshold. But a lot of times, it's more important to see that your team is making improvements—the metric is trending towards improvement.”
Bill Schiller, senior principal software architect at Smiths Medical
Boost Development Productivity With Static Analysis & Unit Testing
Shift-left testing that uses Agile principles for static analysis and unit testing enables continuous feedback and iterative improvements, leading to high code quality and faster, more efficient development cycles.
How It Works
Parasoft solutions support static analysis and unit testing as part of a shift-left strategy. These solutions significantly enhance development and testing productivity, particularly within the tight timelines of product releases. By recommending integration testing practices early in the development process, Parasoft prioritizes code quality from the start, allowing teams to promptly detect and fix defects. Early detection is crucial. It prevents costly and time-consuming rework associated with discovering issues later in the cycle.
With calculators provided below, you can calculate your own return on investment (ROI) for adopting automated static analysis and unit testing. These calculations provide a clear, data-driven way to quantify the financial benefits, highlighting cost savings by comparing the expenses of fixing defects early versus later in the development cycle.
Additionally, the ROI calculators measure productivity gains by showing how much time developers save through early defect detection. The calculator justifies the investment in these tools by demonstrating that initial costs are outweighed by long-term savings and efficiency improvements, underscoring the value of a shift-left approach. Overall, it serves as a powerful tool for showcasing the positive financial impact of implementing static analysis and unit testing within the SDLC.
C/C++ Static Analysis ROI Calculator »
Shift Left Functional Testing With an API-First Strategy
With shift-left testing and API-first approaches, teams can start validating application functionality early in the development process, even before the user interface is complete. Detecting issues earlier ensures robust core business logic and integration points.
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SOAtest How It Works
Parasoft’s AI-enhanced SOAtest helps teams adopt a shift-left, API-first functional test strategy. With an API-first testing strategy in place, teams prioritize testing APIs before building and testing the user interface, which ensures that the core functionality and integrations are reliable and well-tested.
By leveraging our solution with service definition files such as OpenAPI, QA teams can codelessly generate test cases for API specifications even before the APIs are fully developed. This proactive approach ensures that functional testing is embedded early in the process, identifying potential issues at a stage where they’re cheaper and easier to fix.
Focusing on functional testing through the APIs, rather than waiting for the web UI to be complete, provides significant value. APIs are generally more stable and change less frequently than the UI, which can undergo numerous iterations and design changes. This stability allows QA teams to build a robust automated test suite that ensures core functionality is intact, regardless of changes in the user interface. By the time the web UI is ready, the underlying functionality has already been thoroughly validated, reducing the risk of critical bugs and accelerating the overall release cycle.
Read Blog: API ROI: Maximize the ROI of API Testing »
Testing Web UIs Early and Often
Shifting UI testing left in the SDLC establishes a solid infrastructure to reduce delays associated with testing later. With Parasoft solutions, teams can codelessly test web UI components and user flows for continuous validation throughout the process.
How It Works
Parasoft SOAtest and Selenic empower teams to implement a shift-left approach in UI testing. SOAtest allows testers to scriptlessly generate UI test cases by recording user actions. This means that teams can start testing new, fully functional UI components during development. Selenic complements this by generating Java-based Selenium scripts from recorded UI actions. SOAtest tests and Selenium scripts can be easily integrated into CI/CD pipelines, enabling automated UI testing with each code check-in.
While SOAtest and Selenic are both easy to use, each tool serves a different purpose.
- SOAtest is a codeless omni-channel tool that allows teams to test across multiple, different interfaces of the application such as API, web, mobile, database, and more.
- Selenic is perfect for testers writing tests in Java using a Selenium framework. Since it leverages a code-based testing technique, testers gain more control and flexibility.
SOAtest and Selenic offer shift-left UI testing solutions that prevent cascading issues, reduce the cost of fixes, and ultimately lead to higher quality UI experiences.
Selenic 
CASE STUDY
|
Caesars Entertainment Defines & Measures ROI for Test Automation
Prior to Caesars automating testing with AI-optimized Parasoft Selenic, executing UI tests took excessively long—many days.
96%
Improvement in UI testing by moving from manual to automation.
$1 million
Savings per year by automating testing.
Satisfying Nonfunctional Testing Requirements Early
When teams, including testers, shift left nonfunctional test automation like performance, security, and accessibility testing, they can start testing early on their own instead of waiting to pass it to specialized teams that don’t catch issues until late in the SDLC when the entire product is developed.
Performance Testing
SOAtest helps teams shift left performance testing and integrate it into their daily workflows and CI/CD pipelines to detect and address performance issues early. Doing so enables continuous monitoring and validation of performance metrics, ensuring each build meets required standards. Using our automated functional testing solution, teams can codelessly repurpose SOAtest API components and scenario test cases for performance testing, supporting load, stress, and scalability testing. This streamlines the process, allowing teams to validate performance under various conditions without having to maintain a separate test suite.
Ensure consistent test cases and reduce the overhead of managing multiple tools with reusability features. SOAtest enables teams to start creating API tests as soon as a service definition is available, so teams can validate API functionality and performance requirements early. They do this by running API component tests with various levels of virtual users as soon as the API has been developed. Early performance validation and continuous tracking of metrics enable trend analysis over time, helping teams understand the impact of code changes on performance. This approach allows for data-driven decisions and continuous improvement to ensure robust, reliable, and user-friendly applications.
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Security Testing
Parasoft provides static application security testing (SAST) solutions for C, C++, Java, C#, and .NET, enabling early detection and remediation of vulnerabilities, which reduces the risk of security breaches and expensive, late-stage fixes. With out-of-the-box support for secure coding standards like OWASP, CWE, CERT, PCI DSS, DISA ASD STIG, UL 2900, and more, teams can start validating their code for security issues during active development.
SOAtest further enhances a shift-left approach to security assurance by enabling teams to transform existing functional test cases created with SOAtest into security penetration tests. This allows teams to validate against OWASP and CWE standards seamlessly. By integrating these security tests into early testing processes, organizations ensure that security measures are embedded from the outset, reducing costs and efforts associated with remediating late-stage vulnerabilities.
The ability to repurpose functional test cases for security testing saves time. It also ensures comprehensive coverage, enhancing the overall security posture of the application without the need for additional tools.
Read Blog: How to Make API Security Testing an Automated Part of the CI Process »
Web Accessibility
Delaying accessibility testing until the late stages of the SDLC can result in costly and time-consuming rework, as issues discovered at this point often require significant changes to the UI. By inserting accessibility testing from the beginning, teams can ensure that inclusivity is a core aspect of the development process, reducing the risk of late-stage rework and enhancing the user experience for individuals with disabilities.
SOAtest facilitates this proactive approach making it easy for QA testers to generate web UI tests from recorded user actions inside the UI and then scan the web pages for accessibility issues related to WCAG standards. Existing web UI test cases created with SOAtest can be repurposed for accessibility testing in the same way. Teams can identify and address accessibility barriers early, giving QA testers a head start on validating that the website follows the most common guidelines prior to a formal audit process.
By automating the detection of accessibility issues and executing accessibility testing as a part of CI/CD pipelines, Parasoft streamlines the testing process, making it more efficient and effective promoting a more inclusive digital environment.
Read Blog: Web Accessibility Testing: The Value of Shifting Left »
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Shift Left Testing With Service Virtualization
Service virtualization enables teams to simulate dependent systems, enabling earlier and more comprehensive testing. This helps increase test thoroughness by modeling different state conditions of dependent systems using their virtualized representations.
How It Works
Parasoft’s service virtualization solution empowers development and QA teams to shift left testing efforts by streamlining access to test environments. They can simulate the behavior of dependent systems that might be unavailable, costly to access, or still under development by generating virtual test environments. This capability allows teams to start testing much sooner in the SDLC, ensuring that potential issues are identified and addressed at an early stage.
Additionally, our solution facilitates continuous and parallel testing, which is crucial for maintaining high test coverage and thoroughness within the tight timelines of Agile sprints. Service virtualization provides stable, predictable test environments and gives teams the ability to mimic specific behaviors that are difficult to reproduce in live systems, which results in thorough testing. This accelerates the development process. It also enhances the software quality and reliability thanks to early detection and prompt resolution.
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CTP Getting Started With Parasoft
Improve your team’s development efficiency and software quality by implementing shift-left testing strategies with Parasoft solutions.
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CASE STUDY
|
WoodmenLife Redefines Testing to Reach Quality Goals
“To shift left, change how you’re working, not the work you’re doing. Transform the mindset and the processes, redefine your strategy, and use the tools to help achieve that goal.”
Danny Oslin, Manager of Enterprise Automation at WoodmenLife
Hit your software quality, safety, and security targets every time.