The traditional software development lifecycle when graphed on a paper has two sides, left and right. While the left side of the graph includes design and development, the right side includes production staging, stress testing, and user acceptance.
To shift left in DevOps simply means the necessity of taking as many tasks on the right i.e. that typically happens toward the end of the application development process and incorporate them into earlier stages of a DevOps methodology.
- There are several ways of accomplishing a shit left in DevOps, most notably:
- Create production-ready artifacts at the end of every Agile sprint
- Incorporating static code analysis routines in every build
- The level of doing the DevOps the right way is directly dependent on the degree of shifting left as much as possible.