TDD

Shift left thinking applied to the full software delivery cycle

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Jasper Bogers

After the success of agile transformations that gave organisations the ability to respond to a change in the market more quickly and frequently, the last decade saw DevOps emerge as another magic wand. While valuable by itself, DevOps should actually be treated as one of many aspects of the Shift Left paradigm applied to the full software delivery life cycle. Patrick Debois, Andrew Shafer, John Allspaw and Paul Hammond coined the word DevOps around 2008. It comes down to the insight that combining the disciplines of development and IT operations by removing the thresholds between them allows for the elimination of waste and improvement of quality and speed of software delivery. The concept of Shift Left comes from the field of testing and boils down to the idea that the earlier in the software life cycle a fault is found, the cheaper it is to fix it. The accompanying model for this concept is that the process for delivering software goes from left to right as it goes from concept to cash.

Traditional left to right view of a software delivery pipeline

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