Dev's: own your destiny with #ShiftLeft

Power has shifted to the developer in many ways. If you write code you are in high demand and are likely to get nice perks and maybe even a signing bonus big enough to buy a fancy car. That's great, but how much of your professional destiny remains outside your control? If you are still working in a world where you wait days or weeks for someone else to validate your code and approve it for deployment, the answer is, "too much."

Modern code building is about moving fast by keeping releases small and frequent. It's also about fast feedback and small autonomous teams. You probably do your own unit testing which quickly confirms you are heading in the right direction, but what about functional API testing and performance feedback? If you are waiting for somebody outside your immediate team to create and run those tests, then there are good odds that there is too little testing being done and it's being done way too late in the process.

Imagine being "done" and moving on to your next project only to get a slack or email six weeks later reporting a bug in your code found during a last-minute performance test. Release is on hold. Sucks to be you.

Shift left testing puts you back in control of your destiny by letting you run your own functional and performance tests while the code is fresh in your mind. Instead of breaking the build or being the reason a deployment gets pushed back, you commit your code and move on knowing you have test coverage and your code rocks.

It would be nice to have a SDET shadowing you to build tests as you code, but for now they are pretty scarce and you don't have to become a testing specialist to build your own useful tests. Ask around. There are probably other dev's who already have been using JMeter or Selenium. With Taurus you can write tests with a few lines of code in YAML or JSON that will "light up" your endpoints with some concurrency, validate responses and put you back in control. Go for it.