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Shift Left Is the Tip of the Iceberg

(semiengineering.com)
172 points yatrios | 9 comments | 19 Nov 24 14:06 UTC | HN request time: 1.559s | source | bottom
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0xbadcafebee ◴[19 Nov 24 15:15 UTC] No.42184298[source]▶
For those not aware, Shift Left[1] is (at this point) an old term that was coined for a specific use case, but now refers to a general concept. The concept is that, if you do needed things earlier in a product cycle, it will end up reducing your expense and time in the long run, even if it seems like it's taking longer for you to "get somewhere" earlier on. I think this[2] article is a good no-nonsense explainer for "Why Shift Left?".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift-left_testing [2] https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/what-is-shift-left-and-w...

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1. bigs ◴[19 Nov 24 19:58 UTC] No.42187463[source]▶
Sounds like a similar/parallel thought to the project management waterfall paradigm whereby the earlier you get things correct (left) the less costly it is in the long run or conversely if you have to go and re-do things later on (right) you’re in for a shock (either cost, time or quality).
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2. tromp ◴[19 Nov 24 21:29 UTC] No.42188286[source]▶
Funny how correct is not associated with right. The normal association is reflected in he Haskell Either datatype for describing computations that either run into some error (Left error) or run successfully producing a value (Right value).
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3. lolinder ◴[19 Nov 24 23:34 UTC] No.42189226[source]▶
That's because the association isn't right or wrong, it's progressing or not progressing, deriving from reading order. A Left value typically halts computation there and returns something to the user, whereas a Right value allows you to move on.

One nice side effect of tying the mnemonic to reading direction rather than homonyms is that it carries over across languages better (though still imperfectly).

4. brightball ◴[20 Nov 24 03:34 UTC] No.42190614[source]▶
I’ve come to the conclusion that Kent Beck got just about everything right with Extreme Programming. There’s just not a formal training industry out there pushing it so many more people are selling and invested in other approaches with a lot of warts.
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5. devjab ◴[20 Nov 24 13:27 UTC] No.42193756[source]▶
XP is almost the opposite or shift right, similar to how every other “agile” development form pushes the necessary work forward. I think it’s telling that none of the modern software design systems seem to have given us a world where our industry is capable of delivering software on time and within budget. They’ve been around for 20 years, places follow them religiously and still fail.

Maybe everything about those concepts are just wrong? I mean, you can have people like Uncle Bob who’ll tell you that “you just got it wrong”. He’s also always correct in this, but if so many teams “get it wrong” then maybe things like clean, xp and so on simply suck?

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6. marcosdumay ◴[20 Nov 24 16:10 UTC] No.42195278{3}[source]▶
> I think it’s telling that none of the modern software design systems seem to have given us a world where our industry is capable of delivering software on time and within budget.

It's worth noting that left-leaning systems were widely used once too, and they had about half of the overall success rate of the right-leaning ones on those criteria.

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7. devjab ◴[20 Nov 24 18:15 UTC] No.42196665{4}[source]▶
I’ve never seen any actual metrics on it that weren’t pseudoscience at best. If you have some I would genuinely like to see them.

From my anecdotal experience YAGNI and making sure it’s easy to delete everything is the only way to build lasting maintainability in software. All those fancy methods like SOLID, DRY, XP are basically just invitations for building complexity you’ll never actually need. Not that you can really say that something like XP is all wrong, nothing about it is bad. It’s just that nothing about it is good without extreme moderation either.

I guess it depends on where you work. If it’s for customers or a business, then I think you should just get things out there. Running into scalability issues is good, it means you’ve made it further than 95% of all software projects.

8. brightball ◴[20 Nov 24 22:10 UTC] No.42198637{3}[source]▶
I’m curious what you think about XP is “shift right”?
9. Centigonal ◴[21 Nov 24 04:15 UTC] No.42201048[source]▶
a sinister observation, dexterously phrased.