Over the recent years, agile teams have started practicing the shift left test approach to speed up their product deliveries and remove testing bottlenecks. Often teams tend to shift functional testing to the left of delivery cycle, addressing the Cross Functional Requirements (aka) Non functional Requirements(NFR) at the end.

The functional requirements of the product defines the behaviour of the system whereas the Cross-Functional Requirements(CFRs) define the operational attributes of the system like performance, availability, reliability, usability, accessibility, audit, logging, recoverability, user volume, security, localisation, etc.

Consider a case where an online retail application has launched its big sale days with exceptionally great deals, triggering the enthusiasm of millions of users to access the application at the same time. The moment the big sale started, the website received a peak load from its users. Unable to withstand the load, the application was inaccessible until a suitable fix was done by the engineering team. Would this make the customers happy with online shopping experience? How many people would stay in the application until it’s up again? Would they shop in the application if this repeats? 

If performance of the system had been tested early and effectively with proper focus and time, would the app end up in this situation of loosing millions of customers?

This session talks about the importance and need to shift CFR tests to the left of delivery cycle for high confident and quality releases. It gives step by step explanation of shift left process and practices that helps build CFRs into the product right from project kickoff till delivery along with an example case study.The case study covers performance testing of an application using the above said approach.