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Insight Horizon Media

What does the concept of shift left mean?

Author

Daniel Johnson

Published Feb 15, 2026

What does the concept of shift left mean?

Shift Left is a practice intended to find and prevent defects early in the software delivery process. The idea is to improve quality by moving tasks to the left as early in the lifecycle as possible. Shift Left testing means testing earlier in the software development process.

What does it mean to shift left in DevOps?

The term “shift left” refers to the efforts of a DevOps team to guarantee application security at the earliest stages in the development lifecycle, as part of an organizational pattern known as DevSecOps (collaboration between development, security, and operations).

What is shift right and shift left?

The Shift Left testing approach uses the ‘test early and often’ mantra to perform testing earlier in the lifecycle(thereby moving left on the project timeline). Whereas, the Shift Right approach in DevOps testing enables you to test in production, and prepare for the undefined, unknown, and unexpected.

What is shift left ITSM?

In the service management world, a shift-left approach involves moving incidents and requests to the lowest support tier possible. It’s an initiative all IT organizations push for so they can better manage the high volume of tickets and calls received to the service desk without having to add resources.

How is shift left implemented?

So what are the best practices of getting started with Shift Left Testing?

  1. Identify & Plan Testing Lifecycle.
  2. Integrate Development & Project Management Process with Testing.
  3. Define Quality Standards & Controls for All SDLC Stages.
  4. Plan Departmental Deployments.
  5. Create Process & Operation driven Test Cases & Framework.

Who coined the term shift left?

Larry Smith
Shift-left testing is an approach to software testing and system testing in which testing is performed earlier in the lifecycle (i.e. moved left on the project timeline). It is the first half of the maxim “Test early and often.” It was coined by Larry Smith in 2001.

What is shift left performance testing?

Shifting performance testing left means enabling developers and testers to conduct performance testing in the early stages of development cycles. A shift-left performance testing strategy instead allows smaller, ad hoc performance tests to be performed by testers against individual components as they are developed.

What is shift right in DevOps?

By “shift right”, people mean that they aren’t going to just throw the feature over the wall to ops when it deploys, they’re going to monitor, observe, analyze log data, and “test in production.” DevOps drew our attention to the need to keep testing even when the new changes are deployed to production.

Why is shift left important?

The shift-left model demands attention to quality and increases the ability to identify and correct defects when they occur. Testing should be started as early as possible in the Software Development Life Cycle. Hence, it would be easy to identify defects and fix while keeping the cost low.

What does a right shift mean?

The right shift operator ( >> ) shifts the first operand the specified number of bits to the right. Excess bits shifted off to the right are discarded. Copies of the leftmost bit are shifted in from the left.

What does left shift operator do?

The left shift operator ( << ) shifts the first operand the specified number of bits to the left. Excess bits shifted off to the left are discarded. Zero bits are shifted in from the right.