Software Engineer’s Problems — With ‘Shift-left’ everything, what’s left on the right? A view from the middle.

A prospective client once said, “We are starting up a new testing team, we need 20 Java engineers with mortgage domain experience”!

He also said they are trying to shift-left, in a big way!

This was 2017 and somewhat understandable, given the testing stack and the fact that test automation was a big theme for a lot of our financial services clients.

Starting in 2018-2019, I have started seeing signs that, developers asked to be experts in AWS infrastructure setup, VPC (Virtual sub-nets), and yeah, we also want them to validate and remediate security and application pen testing issues on their own, auto-generated security code smells by CI pipeline.

Then shortly after, Gartner apparently said, we need to shift right?!?

Now in, 2020, we started seeing clients look at development teams for help in setting up the highly resilient Kubernetes and Kafka environments, and setting up monitoring on the cloud. Developers now need to be experts at submitting and managing IaC — Infrastructure as Code — e.g., Terraform scripts!

The concept of shift-left, or specifically, shift-left-testing originated at the time of Agile and DevOps coming into prominence (for large organizations, anyway), back in 2016/17, as part of shifting testing focus early and often, during the SDLC loop.