Testing earlier assures better quality. But maybe most important, things like agile and DevOps—which encourage that you shift your testing left and allow for more collaboration between different parts of your team—have broken down the walls that previously separated testers for the rest of the organization.

The concept behind continuous testing is far from new, but what’s different now is that software development practices have evolved to a point where developers are embracing testing as part of their responsibilities. Testing is slowly moving from being an “event” to an activity throughout the development lifecycle.

Testing has often been seen as the final stage of creating an application. Since we weren’t shifting testing left as much as we do today, a great deal of work was thrown on the testing team at the very end of an exhausting project cycle. But testers shouldn’t be seen as the last line of defense.