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I've never heard of this either. Shifting left only changes the timing of work, not the workload.

Not in the systems I've worked in. I interpret "shifting left" as preferring unit tests to integration tests. In that world, a unit test that runs in the same env as the dev box running compiler and completes in 20 ms will allow much, much faster iteration than an integration test that has to spin up an EC2 instance, upload code, run a script, download results, etc

I believe the article writer is talking about moving QA work to the beginning of a process, not adding unit tests to the front of a pipeline.

Theyre both examples of shifting left, though.

There's always a context contingent cost/benefit trade off, but sometimes converting integration to unit tests is a win.

Yes of course, but your mentioning unit tests in a comment about moving work steps but they are totally different things in this context.

That's often not true. Testing more, earlier, tends to surface problems whe they require less work to fix.

Easier context switching, less dealing with extra added complexity between coding the issue and fixing it etc.

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