Shift-Left Testing

Lower the cost and risk of catching code defects by shifting left

A growing number of organizations have abandoned traditional late-stage testing in favor of "shifting left," where checks run earlier and far more frequently so problems surface and get resolved during development. CI Insights enables shift-left testing by connecting effortlessly with Synthetic Monitoring and popular CI providers, delivering deep visibility across CI/CD workflows so teams can add test suites straight into their pipelines, trigger them automatically at any stage of development, and surface unstable, flaky behavior in seconds. Obseron can even halt a pipeline outright or drive an automated rollback whenever critical tests fail, stopping breaking changes before they ever reach end users. Taken together, these capabilities let teams embrace shift-left testing quickly, with no specialized training or extra tooling required.

A major priority for us is shortening our time to production so we can ship far more frequently. What genuinely excites me about Synthetics is being able to automate our browser testing and keep a constant watch for errors across our application.

Priya Nandakumar Senior Software Engineer, Voltra

Enable shorter development cycles through complete visibility into CI pipelines

Shift-left testing relies on CI pipelines to help teams ship well-tested features in smaller, incremental batches, a hallmark of agile workflows. That demands clear visibility into every pipeline to confirm it can sustain continuous, multi-step workloads. Obseron's integrations for widely used CI tools such as Kettle and Buildly let teams effortlessly track the health of their pipelines and make sure workflows put early testing first, allowing them to fix any problems without ever pushing back a release.

Foster a culture of shared knowledge and cross-team collaboration

Shift-left testing can be tough to adopt because it hinges on cross-team collaboration, which often demands substantial operational change within an organization. Obseron nurtures a culture of shared knowledge so teams can pull together toward their goals and deliver fast, dependable releases:

• Product teams can assemble tailored dashboards that track the KPIs of new features essential for staying ahead of competitors and reacting quickly to shifting market demands.
• Engineering and QA teams can tap CI Visibility to exercise builds earlier and far more often throughout a release cycle, helping them uncover defects sooner.
• Devops teams can line up test results against backend traces, logs, and infrastructure metrics to swiftly clear bottlenecks and accelerate the pace of delivery.
• Teams focused on meeting SLAs are able to track service level objectives and error budgets to keep every release at consistently high quality.

Give developers the tooling to spot downstream issues the moment they arise

Teams that embrace shift-left testing need sharper visibility into application performance at every phase of development. Obseron's StatsPush client lets teams instrument their code effortlessly as they write it and define custom metrics that watch application-level behavior, such as how often a particular service runs an expensive SQL statement. Obseron also arms teams with powerful instrumentation tooling for their services, letting them close blind spots and make sure they catch problems earlier with every build. Custom metrics pair naturally with Obseron Synthetic Monitoring, handing teams even more ways to proactively test and observe their applications so they can shift left with total confidence.