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Shift Left Is the Tip of the Iceberg

(semiengineering.com)
172 points yatrios | 2 comments | 19 Nov 24 14:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.56s | source
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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. bloodyplonker22 ◴[19 Nov 24 22:37 UTC] No.42188834[source]▶
I had management who were so enthused about "shift left" that we shifted far left and broke the shifter, or perhaps, mis-shifted. Now we spend too much time developing test plan and testing and arguing about PRD that we actually deliver more slowly than competitor by a lot.
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2. hinkley ◴[19 Nov 24 22:42 UTC] No.42188861[source]▶
Another flavor of this I've encountered is people in the management chain who can only think about faults per time interval and not about faults per interaction.

So you make a tool that prevents errors and speeds up a process, now people use it four times as much, and now they wonder why they're only seeing half as many faults instead of an order of magnitude less.

We are humans. We cannot eliminate errors, we can only replace them with a smaller number of different errors. Or as in your case, a larger number of them.