There is a lot of talk in the testing world about shifting left. Basically, “shift left” refers to moving the test process to an earlier point in the development process, independent of the development approach. This article explores a case in which shift-left has been applied, and the lesson is that shifting left cannot be achieved by testers alone—it must result from a team effort.

How many times does something seem too obvious to check? Most of the time this normal human response is a handy shortcut. Your brain tries to save you time—but you can’t always trust it. If your code malfunctions, each of those "too obvious to check" thoughts will bias your thinking about what caused the malfunction. We have to commit up front, before our thinking crystalizes, that the code will have to prove to us that it is correct.

When it comes to achieving sustainable test automation, having an appropriate test automation team structure in place is the most important first step to take. This article has some proven practices for a few different test automation adoption scenarios—led by an automation team or a regression team, and with agile adaptations—that have helped organizations enjoy long-term test automation success.

Standard web-monitoring tools can ping webpages and verify that they’re responding, but they don’t alert you to an issue. But you can use the technology in load testing to monitor your sites by running an interactive script that can detect issues and generate emails as needed. It runs constantly like a silent sentry, never sleeping or taking a vacation, improving your sites' reliability.