What is Shift Left in Devops?

Shift Left in DevOps is a practice whereby testing, quality assurance, and performance assessment are moved as early as possible into the software development lifecycle. The aim is to prevent problems rather than discover them later, thereby lessening the chance of failures happening during production. As testing and quality checks are built-in earlier, the efficiency of issue identification and remediation, customer satisfaction, and time-to-market efficiency are better maintained.

It encourages an environment that allows for continuous testing and deployment that leads to automatic tests, testing under production-like conditions early in a development cycle, anticipating changes that might impact performance, allowing processes to be standardized and validated before reaching production, hence minimizing the expenditure of effort and money associated with fixing errors later on.

The adoption of the Shift Left approach implies many-changing organizational workflows giving preference to automation and scalability. Developers are put in charge of quality and security, prescriptively using tools that act as gatekeepers ensuring that policies get implemented to use sound open-source components. With early identification and resolution of issues, it emphasizes delating quality and security while accelerating development speeds and stability, driving some degree of innovation to spark into unit testing. Such an approach lowers the risk of breaches, delays, and price inflation for fixing issues that surface late in the product cycle, with the final effects of speeding time-to-market and improving the cooperation and interaction between development and operations.