In the world of the DevOps & Agility revolution, two key approaches have emerged to enhance software development and delivery processes: Shift Left and Shift Right.
I’m pretty sure that all you heard about it, but do we really know the difference?
Shift Left and Shift Right strategies focus on different stages of the SDLC, but they share together the same goal: improving quality, reducing risks, achieving a faster time to market, and improving the end-user experience.
The image below summarizes some key aspects of Shift Left and Shift Right, their timing, and risks. Additionally, this blog explains in some simple words the importance of striking the right balance between the two approaches and highlights the differences when applying these strategies to applications in maintenance versus applications in evolution.
Shift Left in a nutshell:
Focus: Shift Left emphasizes early and continuous testing, code analysis, and quality assurance activities. It aims to identify and fix defects as early as possible in the development process.
Timing: Shift Left activities occur EARLY during the initial phases of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), such as requirements gathering, design, and coding.
Risk: By catching defects early, Shift Left reduces the risk of discovering critical issues during later stages such as preproduction and production, minimizing the impact on user dissatisfaction.
Shift Right in a Nutshell:
Focus: Shift Right focuses on post-production activities, such as monitoring, observability, feedback gathering, and continuous improvement. It aims to gather insights from real-world usage and enhance the product based on user feedback.
Timing: Shift Right activities occur after the application is deployed, allowing for monitoring and feedback collection in real time.
Risk: Shift Right mitigates the risk of delivering a product that doesn’t meet user expectations, by introducing changes that may cause production incidents or disrupt the user experience.
Shift Left and Shift Right Balance
Striking the right balance involves allocating sufficient time and resources EARLY during the initial phases of the SDLC for comprehensive testing and quality assurance activities while maintaining an efficient development pace. Then after a RELEASE deployment allocate resources to continuous monitoring and feedback analysis while ensuring that these activities do not disrupt ongoing development efforts.
Takeaways for Leadership Teams
Leadership teams may face many challenges and must take fundamental decisions depending on the application’s state.
For applications in maintenance, Shift Left remains crucial to identify and fix defects quickly. It helps maintain the stability and reliability of the application, minimizing incidents in production, downtime, and user dissatisfaction. Shift Right can complement maintenance efforts by monitoring performance, issues logs, and implementing alerting systems to gain in proactivity. Additionally identifying areas for improvement and incorporating user feedback for feature enhancements.
For applications in evolution, both Shift Left and Shift Right play significant roles. Shift Left activities enable the integration of new features or changes while ensuring the overall quality of the application. Shift Right activities help gather insights on user adoption, and usage patterns, and identify opportunities for innovation, ultimately driving the application’s evolution.
The right balance between the two strategies is crucial to maintain the focus on early defect identification and prevention and emphasizes post-production monitoring and user feedback. The application’s state, whether in maintenance or evolution, determines the emphasis and timing of these strategies. By combining both approaches effectively, organizations can achieve a robust and continuously improving software development and delivery process.
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