Essential Shift-Right Practices for Testing in Production?

July 28, 2023

Too many production systems are like Schrodinger’s cat, trapped inside a box with no method of observing its true state.

Shift right testing approach in production allows a software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) team to plan for potential issues. It can also be used to analyze the user’s experience. However, what is critical is to identify testing in production as not something that simply implies releasing untested code in the hope that it will function properly or waiting for defects and bugs to be discovered after it has moved to the customer end.

Increasing Expectations in Production Testing

It is difficult to capture all flaws during the development lifecycle or to simulate a live, real-world situation. As a result, development and quality assurance teams devote significant time and resources on white-box and black-box testing, exploratory testing, and automation testing.

They also contemplate other settings for validating user flows, such as Dev, QA, and User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Dev and QA teams employ mock test data to uncover problems with all potential scenarios, corner situations, and out-of-the-box techniques, but they cannot always capture the end user’s intents. Partially testing code can be problematic because it does not guarantee that the code will work correctly in production. Furthermore, it is critical not to wait for problems to occur in the production cycle or for the users to identify.

Benefits of Shift Right Testing Approach in Production

  • A collection of tests that incorporates fresh updates with live traffic and a user group.
  • Failures, unexpected breakage, slow performance, usability, and acceptability are all examples of user experience tests.
  • Tests that influence product quality by collecting ongoing feedback from end users.
  • An activity that gradually and iteratively builds client confidence and anticipation in a product.
Scenario Benefits of Shift Right Approach
Bug Bash
  • Identifies and catches more bugs, including identifying different types of bugs.
  • Reduces the regression testing time.
  • Incorporates IT team and other employee’s perspectives as well as experiences.
  • Enables a streamlined collaboration across teams of production.
A / B Testing
  • Reduces bounce rates.
  • Supports a boost to the conversion rates.
  • Easy to understand results.
  • Inexpensive.
  • An upward trajectory of sales.
Canary testing
  • Risk landscape is controlled: Only a small percentage of users are affected by the bug
  • A boost to quality assurance leading to faster release of new features.
  • As soon as a defect or bug is identified, the feature is removed. It slows down the application and prevents negative feedback from the user.
  • The feedback loop is shortened, thus supporting a faster feedback time and including new features to the production cycle swiftly.

Outcomes of Shift Right Testing Approach in Production

  • The entire scope and diversity of the manufacturing environment.
  • The actual customer traffic workload.
  • Reduces the dangers of continual delivery.
  • Customers are assured that the product is ready for production.
  • Engineers can add, delete, or edit highlights based on input.
  • Increases programme efficiency.
  • Aids in the faster dissemination of items.
  • Captures issues before they are noticed by end users.

The manufacturing environment is always evolving. Even if a programme does not change, the infrastructure on which it is based does. Shift right approach in production validates the health and quality of a specific production deployment as well as the constantly changing production environment.

Rundown

Shift right approach in production is becoming an unavoidable component of the testing process. When millions of individuals visit a single piece of software from thousands of various devices, browsers, browser versions, and operating systems, it is difficult to foresee and correct all errors without true user experience. The number of production releases has increased because over 90% of software organizations have adopted agile approaches. Unfortunately, each production release has the potential to alter how things work in the actual world. As a result, DevOps teams must test all changes in production as soon as feasible to assure the dependability of any programme. It can be damaging to a software company’s reputation if these concerns are not discovered before the clients.

Thus, the shift right approach in production testing is extremely beneficial to DevOps-aligned developers and organizations. It improves user experiences, brand reputation, and money by allowing developers to be better prepared to deal with anomalies.

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