Quality Shift in DevOps: Left‑Shift and Right‑Shift Thinking

In this talk, Chen Xiaopeng, a senior project‑management expert from a leading Chinese internet company, shares insights from the 2021 China DevOps Community Summit in Shenzhen, focusing on quality shift within DevOps.

DevOps’s twin siblings : DevOps combines development (Dev) and operations (Ops). Over time, related terms such as DevSecOps, BizDevOps, DataOps, and AIOps have emerged, but adding testing does not create a new term like DevQaOps.

Where does testing belong in DevOps? Testing is not confined to development alone; it spans both Dev and Ops. The speaker illustrates that testing activities appear in every step of the nine‑step DevOps loop, emphasizing both automated (gray) and exploratory (yellow) testing.

Quality left‑shift and right‑shift : Traditional testing (gray) covers only a small portion of quality activities. Yellow areas represent exploratory testing that uncovers unpredictable issues, while blue areas involve early risk assessment before code is complete. The speaker identifies two mid‑points: unit testing (left‑shift) and post‑deployment testing (right‑shift), as well as coding before (left‑shift) and after (right‑shift) integration.

Automation testing : Automation is the foundation of quality assurance in DevOps, covering unit tests, code scanning, smoke tests, and deployment verification within the CI/CD pipeline. Efficient automation must complete within minutes to support rapid feedback.

Exploratory testing : Unlike traditional scripted testing, exploratory testing merges learning, test design, and execution in a single iterative step, allowing testers to discover bugs through divergent thinking, similar to finding mines in a Minesweeper game.

Chaos engineering : Inspired by Amazon’s “game days,” chaos engineering injects failures into production to validate system resilience. The process includes defining a stable state, hypothesizing failures, designing experiments, learning, and improving the system.

The talk concludes with a call for the 2022 China DevOps Community Summit in Tianjin on August 13, inviting participants to purchase tickets.