Understanding the shift-left movement in DevOps

Shift left has become a popular term over the past years. But what do we mean by this? It's about moving activities that were originally planned at a later stage up to the beginning of a process. This is typically the case with testing, which for a long time was executed as soon as the whole product was delivered to a test team. Shift-left testing has become an important paradigm in DevOps: executing tests as early as possible. By having tests already from the beginning of development, issues will be found much sooner and can be fixed in that early stage. It will improve the end product. The following figure shows the impact of shift-left testing:

Figure 7.1 – Impact of shift-left testing

The shift-left principle can be applied to more processes in DevOps. Think of the very first step in DevOps: design. IT teams, both software developers and cloud engineers working on the infrastructure, should have...