Shift left
Shift left is the practice of performing testing, security, operations, compliance, or other quality activities earlier in the software development lifecycle.
Secure APIs
Shift left is a software security approach that moves security activities earlier in the development lifecycle.
- How it is used
- Guides API teams to address security during design, implementation, testing, and delivery rather than retrofitting it before release.
- How deep it goes
- Explains the lifecycle principle, design risks, testing practices, and mitigations, but does not provide detailed implementation code.
- Examples
- Uses deployment-time testing, an exposed stock property, scalping, SQL injection, regular-expression patching, and enumeration constraints.
- What you can do after
- Apply it by assessing vulnerabilities during design, testing frequently, and resolving failures before advancing through development.
Software Testing with Generative AI
Shift-left testing is the practice of performing testing activities earlier in the software development lifecycle.
- How it is used
- Moves testing analysis into requirements discussion to expose ambiguity before implementation.
- How deep it goes
- Explains the principle through a structured LLM prompt, heuristic, output format, few-shot example, and requirements input.
- Examples
- Uses B&B user-access requirements covering administrators, guest accounts, bookings, and account deletion.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via delimiter-based LLM prompts that generate review questions for requirements and feature ideas.
Read how Software Testing with Generative AI explains shift left →
Related concepts
- secure by designequivalent to · Secure by design is an engineering approach that incorporates security requirements and protections throughout a system’s design, development, and lifecycle.
- AI-specific governanceuses · AI governance is the set of policies, processes, controls, and oversight mechanisms for directing and managing the development and use of artificial-intelligence systems.
- developer observabilityuses · Developer observability is the practice of providing developers with telemetry-derived insight into code changes and their effects on applications.
- testkind of · A test is a procedure or check that evaluates behavior using specified inputs or evidence against expected results or criteria.
- continuous deliveryuses · Continuous delivery is a software practice that automates building and validating changes to keep them in a releasable state, ready for deployment.
- productionuses · A production environment is the live operational setting in which software or other systems serve real users, workloads, or business processes.
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