What's your view on shift-left testing and how does full-stack testing fit into that?

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During Ben Dowen’s (@fullsnacktester) masterclass — Teamwork Makes the Full-Stack Testing, Dream Work — Richard Forjoe (@rforjoe) asked the following:

What’s your view on shift left testing and how does full-stack testing fit into that?

Ben mentioned that full-stack testing is analogous to shift-left testing. Something he also shared that I found interesting:

Developers are keen to recognise the layers they are responsible for and not.

And I wonder like, Richard, if testers are to get into full-stack testing, do they have to speak the language of shift-left?

What does that look like in practice?

If you have some experience with full-stack testing, what’s your view on shift-left testing and how it’s analogous (or not) with full-stack testing?

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I consider them more or less orthogonal concepts. Shift left is more about pushing back when you get notified of a bug as far as possible. i.e.

When it’s in the hands of a customer → Staging environment manual tests by QA → Staging environment automated tests → Automated tests being run on a pull request → Tests run on a developer’s machine

The only situation in which I would say that shift left and full stack testing intersect is when one check that is slow is replaced with a check that is fast.

E.g. if I had a failing full stack test that reproduced a bug in a staging environment and it could be replaced by installing and running a type checker instead, that could be run in < 3 seconds on a developer’s machine, that would be an example of shift left.

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Ah yeah, that’s a good example. Thanks for sharing, @hitchdev.