Matej Dušić

Discover how the Shift Left Approach catches bugs early, speeds up feedback, enhances collaboration, and delivers high-quality software faster.

Understanding Shift Left QA: Benefits and Strategies 

At PROTOTYP, we’re committed to delivering products that not only meet expectations but exceed them.

One of the ways we ensure this is by embracing the Shift Left approach to quality assurance (QA). But what exactly is Shift Left, and how can it benefit your next development project? Let’s dive in.


What is the Shift Left Approach?

The Shift Left approach flips this on its head. Instead of waiting for the end, testing and quality control are shifted left, meaning they’re incorporated much earlier in the development lifecycle.

Practically, this means that QA involvement starts the moment we begin planning a project, ensuring that quality is built into every stage—from concept to delivery.

In traditional software development, testing typically occurs at the end of the process—after the product is built, the code is written, and most decisions have already been made.

This often leads to last-minute bugs, delayed releases, and higher costs to fix issues that could have been caught earlier. It shouldn't have to be like that.


Why Shift Left?

Why are we so keen about this approach? Here are a few compelling reasons:


1. Catch Bugs Early (and Fix Them Cheaply)

In software development, the earlier you catch a bug, the cheaper it is to fix. In fact, defects found during the design phase can be up to 100 times cheaper to resolve than those found after release (Segue Technologies, Why Software Fails).

By involving QA early and collaborating closely with developers, we ensure quality is built into every stage—from design to delivery. This proactive approach with early testing practices results in a higher success rate, increasing from 29% to 64% (The Curious Case of the CHAOS Report 2009).

Real-World Example: Consider a financial software application where a bug in the payment processing feature is found late in development. If detected earlier, the fix would be inexpensive.

However, finding it in production could lead to costly transaction errors, customer dissatisfaction, and increased costs. By shifting left, we prevent such issues before they reach the user, ensuring a more stable product from the beginning.


2. Faster Feedback Loops

The Shift Left mentality allows for continuous testing. We don’t wait until all the code is written; instead, testing happens as we develop.

Automated unit tests, integration tests, and static code analysis run alongside code development, giving us immediate feedback on every change. This allows us to address issues in real-time, speeding up your project’s overall timeline.

Real-World Example: In a mobile app development project, incorporating automated tests in the CI/CD pipeline ensures that each new feature or code change is tested immediately.

This allows developers to address issues in real-time rather than waiting for a complete build, reducing integration problems and speeding up the development cycle.


3. Better Collaboration Between Teams

Shift Left promotes a culture of collaboration. Rather than working in silos, our teams work together throughout the entire development process. QA, developers, designers, and product owners share responsibility for quality, creating a more cohesive and efficient workflow.

This approach also guarantees that everyone is aligned on the project goals—meaning fewer misunderstandings and more innovation.

Real-World Example: During the development of a new feature for Propoze, our custom proposal builder tool, regular meetings between developers, designers, QA, and product managers ensure that all aspects of the feature are considered, from user experience to technical feasibility.

This collaborative approach leads to better alignment on objectives and smoother project execution.


4. Reduced Risk of Major Delays

In traditional models, if a major issue is found late in the process, the entire project can come to a standstill.

With Shift Left, this risk is significantly reduced. Testing is ongoing, and any issues that do arise are caught early enough to be fixed without derailing the entire timeline.

Real-World Example: For a healthcare application, early testing of new features and integrations helps identify potential issues with data accuracy or regulatory compliance before they become critical.

This proactive approach reduces the risk of major delays that could arise from compliance issues or data integrity problems.


5. Support for Agile and DevOps Practices

The Shift Left approach aligns perfectly with Agile and DevOps methodologies. In Agile, where development happens in short, iterative sprints, continuous feedback is critical to delivering value.

Shift Left enables us to integrate testing into each sprint, rather than treating it as a separate phase. This continuous integration ensures flexibility and adaptability to changes in scope or priorities.

Real-World Example: In a DevOps environment, integrating automated tests into the CI/CD pipeline allows for continuous integration and delivery. As new code is committed, it’s automatically tested and deployed, enabling rapid iteration and quick adaptation to user feedback.


How We Implement Shift Left at PROTOTYP

At PROTOTYP, Shift Left is at the core of how we work. Here’s how we bring it to life in our projects:


1. Early Involvement of QA

We get our QA engineers involved right from the very beginning of the project. They’re part of the discussions around requirements, design, and user stories, helping to identify potential risks on time and ensuring that quality is a consideration at every step.


2. Automated Testing

Automated tests are integrated into the Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. Any code committed triggers a series of tests, including unit tests, integration tests, and static code analysis. This provides fast feedback on code quality and ensures that issues are caught early.


3. Continuous Feedback and Iteration

Our Agile teams work in short, iterative sprints, and each sprint is accompanied by thorough testing. This keeps feedback continuous, driving improvement at every stage. Any issues identified are fed back into the next sprint to maintain momentum without sacrificing quality.


4. Exploratory Testing

In addition to automated tests, we perform exploratory testing early and often. This helps us find edge cases and catch hidden defects that may not get caught through automation.

We believe that automation should augment—not replace—human creativity in ensuring a comprehensive approach to quality.


What This Means for Your Projects

When you partner with PROTOTYP, you’re not just getting a development team—you’re getting a quality-first approach.

Our Shift Left methodology ensures that we’re building a product that’s not only functional but also robust, secure, and scalable from the start. Here’s what you can expect:

 * Reduced Time to Market: Faster feedback loops and fewer last-minute bugs mean we can deliver projects on time—without ever compromising on quality.
 * Lower Costs: By catching issues early, we save you the cost of fixing them later.
 * Better Collaboration: We work closely with you throughout the project, ensuring that your vision is realized in the best possible way.
 * Continuous Improvement: We’re always looking for ways to improve, both in our code and in how we work. With Shift Left, we’re committed to ongoing quality enhancements that benefit your project.


Conclusion

At PROTOTYP, we believe that quality simply cannot be an afterthought. By embracing the Shift Left approach, we’re able to deliver better products, faster.

Our proactive testing strategy ensures that we catch issues early, reduce risks, and create seamless, high-quality digital experiences for our clients.

Ready to Shift Left? Get in Touch Today.

Shift Left Approach to QA

Follow this tutorial and learn how to create an effective bug reporting method that will save your time and resources. 

What makes an essential bug report? - Prototyped 

What is a “bug report”?

A bug report is a simple and efficient way of communicating that something in the project is not behaving correctly or needs improvement. This may sound trivial, but very often situations arise where the submitted bug report does not have enough information, or the information doesn’t contain key details required to understand or reproduce the issue.

For this reason, someone who has not seen or reproduced this behavior, might not know what exactly is going on.

The goal here is to make a solid foundation for a bug report which can be included in any project and make it easily readable for anyone working on the project. Providing a correct and detailed bug report, which we will cover in the following sections, results in saving a lot of time and effort for your developers.

There are many solid tools and software which can be used for managing a project and writing a bug report, such as “Jira”, “Notion”, etc. Here at PROTOTYP, we’re using Notion as our all-in-one workspace and we use it to write bug reports as well. All examples in this article will be showcased using Notion but the general idea and the point can be applied to any tool that you’re currently using.

Now that we know what the bug report is, let’s see what we need to include in our bug report so the rest of the team can quickly and efficiently reproduce and fix the issue described in the report.


How to write a bug report



Title

Every bug report should have a title. The title of the bug report needs to be short and clear, summarising the issue in a few words. The point is to display the most useful information to anyone on the project.

Consider pointing out to a certain component or a category where the bug occurred so the developers know right from the start what to expect. Avoid describing the entire bug in the title, there is no need to overcomplicate things here, it will only lead to confusion, possible duplicates, and unreadable reports.

A good example of a short and clear bug title would be "Duplicated items are being added to the todo list".


Description

This is the place where you can go to a bit more detail on the bug. Still, try not to overcomplicate it, remember that short and efficient is what we're aiming for. Describe the details that are necessary to understand and reproduce the issue. Avoid including unnecessary and unhelpful details, like describing every single step of the reproduction process. Avoid telling the whole story, the point here is to highlight the summary. Try to mention the frequency of the issue and any necessary circumstances that occurred when you reproduced it.


Priority

How should you determine the priority of a bug? There are many different approaches to this, I found that categorizing bug priorities into the following four levels yielded the best results in addressing the issues in proper order. Therefore, anyone looking at a report can right away know how impactful it is to the project.


These four levels, in ascending order of priority, are:

 1. Minor - this priority is set on bugs that affect a very small portion of the userbase and that do not have a noticeable negative impact on the UX. Minor priority does not reflect the complexity of the issue, but rather how it affects the UX or the presentation of the project. An example of a minor bug would be if a “search button” is not aligned properly with the “search bar”.
 2. Major - we use this priority for bugs that are easily reproduced but there is a "workaround" for them. For example, navigating to “Shop” can be done through two buttons, but one of those buttons is not redirecting correctly. Yes, the user can navigate to the “Shop” via the second button, but we should still address the first, non-functioning button when the higher priority issues are resolved. This has a noticeable negative impact on the user experience and the application flow and should be handled if there are currently no bugs with a higher priority.
 3. Critical - used for bugs that affect most (if not all) of the userbase and have a highly negative impact on the user experience. The functionality is not working and something is seriously wrong. These issues need to be addressed as soon as possible since the feature is rendered unusable. In some cases, “minor” bugs can be turned to "critical" (such as a clumsy typo or a misplaced button on a released project, making everyone involved seem a bit like amateurs).
 4. Blocker - a major functionality on the application is not working or it is causing a large data loss. As the name suggests, the users and testers are blocked from a vital part of the application. These issues are top priority and should be fixed before any other issues that are currently reported.

The term "severity" can also be mentioned quite often in this section, which emphasizes the impact of the bug on a project, while “priority” is used as a method of distributing and assigning bugs to developers.

As it is emphasized earlier, we like to keep it short, simple, and efficient around here, so we bundled severity and priority together and settled on calling it "Priority".



Environment

Bugs and applications behave differently in different environments. In this section, the setting in which the bug was reproduced should be summarized.
The list may vary depending on the project and your workflow, but most of the time that list consists of:

 1. Device (PC, Mac, Android, iPhone, etc.)
 2. OS (Windows 10, macOS Catalina, Android 10, etc.)
 3. Browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, etc.)
 4. Application version
    

A good bug report needs to contain detailed information about the environment where the bug occurs since it helps a lot with reproducing and fixing the bug.

Additionally, I strongly advise good application versioning as it proved helpful to both our QA & development process. Without versioning a project in development, people who are working on the project may sometimes be on different versions of the project, which leads to reporting bugs that may have already been fixed and addressed. It can also disrupt communication until everyone is on the same version of the project.


Steps to reproduce

List of necessary steps that the developer needs to take to reproduce the issue. Make sure to avoid using unnecessary steps, since we want to keep this short and readable. Also, bundle together actions that make sense to be bundled together, for example, "Click on my profile -> log out", as this will appear more readable in some larger reports.

A good example of steps to reproduce would be:

“User avatar doesn’t change after reload”

 1. Open app -> My profile
 2. Click on "Change avatar"
 3. Select avatar -> Save changes
 4. Reload app
    

Ordering steps in this way helps developers so they don't waste time on reproducing simple bugs.


Expected behavior

The result that was expected to happen and should happen after fixing the bug.


Actual behavior

The result contains a bug that was reproduced by the tester or the user.

These two sections are very important since they accurately compare the expected and actual results noticeably. It helps the developer working on it to exactly know why this is a bug and how it should work after fixing it.


Attachments

Depending on the nature of the issue, bugs can be described in more detail and fixed more efficiently by providing additional resources - text files, JSON data, screenshots, videos, etc. This helps with showcasing its reproduction or actual behavior.

Keep in mind not to take long and unnecessary screen captures of the bug, since we want to save time with this method. Also avoid cramming too much data in this section of the bug report and remember, this DOES NOT replace the need for the written section of your report.

Only provide essential information with attachments and make sure to "label" them if you need to provide multiples.

Also, don't forget about logs, I assure you that your developers will love it if you include these when needed.



That’s a wrap!

There we have it, a strong foundation on which you can build and improve upon depending on the needs of your project. Always remember to KISS (“Keep it simple, stupid”) and you will make the QA process of bug reporting on any project streamlined and intuitive.

What is your approach to reporting bugs? Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or ideas for improvement on this topic!

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. Feel free to share your thoughts about this topic in the comments or drop us an email at hello@prototyp.digital. 😄

AuthorMatej Dušić

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