The cost of discovering flaws and security vulnerabilities in a production application can be staggering. When issues arise post-deployment, they can significantly damage your business’s reputation and undermine user trust. Given these challenges, many teams are adopting shift-left testing tools to enhance quality assurance early in the development process.
By moving testing activities “left” in the development timeline, you can identify and remediate issues before they escalate. This leads to high-quality, more stable, and secure applications.
In this article, you will understand how the shift-left testing approach works and then examine some of the best tools to implement it.
Let’s dive in!
What Is Shift-Left Testing?
Shift-left testing is a practice that emphasizes moving testing activities early in the development process. By “shifting left” testing, developers and QA engineers can identify and fix issues and bugs sooner, when they are easier and cheaper to address:
This testing methodology typically happens during the design and coding phases of the software development lifecycle. It involves designing and implementing software that works as expected by following methodologies like Test-Driven Development (TDD).
Along with unit tests, integration tests, and E2E tests, shift-left testing also uses static code analysis (SCA) solutions. These tools scan code, configurations, dependencies, and settings in your repository to detect security vulnerabilities and other flaws. The ultimate goal is to ensure a more robust and reliable application before it reaches production, thereby improving the overall quality assurance (QA) process.
This approach to testing contrasts with shift-right testing, which focuses on testing later in the software lifecycle, closer to production. While shift-right testing relies on techniques like application monitoring to find bugs in live systems, shift-left testing occurs before the application is fully deployed and running.
Main Benefits of Shift-Left Testing
Shifting testing to the left in your software development cycle leads to several benefits, including:
- Quick bug detection: Identify flaws as early as possible in the development cycle, allowing you to address and easily fix them before they become too big and complex. By preventing the accumulation of unresolved issues that can lead to long-term problems in your application, the shift-left testing approach reduces technical debt.
- Improved software quality: Addressing vulnerabilities, code smells, and bugs before they reach production results in higher-quality code. A live application with fewer issues is also a more reliable product for your users.
- Lower costs: Addressing issues earlier in the development process is generally much cheaper than identifying and resolving them later in production. Bugs can significantly slow down and frustrate developers, so facing them timely speeds up coding. The result is a quicker time-to-market, which ultimately reduces overall development costs.
- Enhanced collaboration: Placing so much importance on testing from the beginning encourages developers and QA teams to collaborate closely from day one. This fosters a synergetic environment among development, security, and quality teams.
- Strengthened security: Continuous analysis of code, configurations, and dependencies helps mitigate security risks before it is too late. For more guidance, read our detailed guide on security best practices.
Recommended Shift-Left Testing Approach
Shift-left testing is a process that encompasses several facets of software testing, such as:
- Manual tests: Scripts written by developers to validate the logic and functionality of the code. These include unit tests, performance tests, integration tests, automated tests, and more.
- Dependency inspection: Examine third-party libraries and packages your application relies on to identify known vulnerabilities and make sure they are up to date.
- Configuration inspection: Verify adherence to security best practices by evaluating the settings of the libraries and technologies used by your application.
- Code quality analysis: Analyze source code for quality issues, such as using variables instead of constants, and potential security vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection, without executing it.
The recommended shift-left testing approach is to adopt a set of dedicated tools to cover each of the aspects mentioned above. This ensures thorough coverage and enables you to efficiently and effectively achieve all the benefits introduced earlier.
Keep in mind that — apart from manual tests written by your developers — this approach to testing is mainly carried out by static code analysis (SCA) tools. In particular, shift-left testing tools automatically inspect your codebase, examining all its files for bugs, flaws, and security vulnerabilities.
Since your code or configurations may contain credentials or sensitive information related to your business, those automated tools should be open-source. This way, the community can verify how they operate and make sure they are not stealing data or engaging in other misconduct.
Top 5 Open-Source Shift-Left Testing Tools
Explore some of the best and most useful shift-left testing tools available on the market. For each tool, we will analyze these aspects:
- Testing scenarios covered: Manual testing, dependency inspection, static code analysis, etc.
- Supported programming languages: The programming languages that the tool supports.
- Types of applications supported: Web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, etc.
- GitHub stars: The number of stars the project has received on GitHub.
- Downloads: The number of times the tool has been downloaded from dependency registries like npm.
- Pros: The main advantages of the tool.
- Cons: The main disadvantages of the tool.
- Pricing: The cost of the tool for business or enterprise needs, if applicable.
If you are eager to see how these tools compare, take a look at the summary table below:
ToolGoalSupported Programming LanguagesSupported ApplicationsGitHub StarsDownloadsOpen-Source VersionPremium VersionAutomated Test FrameworksWrite and run test scriptsDepends on the framework (e.g., JavaScript, Python, Java, etc.)Web, desktop, mobile applicationsVariesVaries✅VariesOSV-ScannerVulnerability scanningC, C++, Dart, Elixir, Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, RustWeb applications6kUndisclosed✅❌TruffleHogSecret scanning and detectionAnyAny15.8kUndisclosed✅✅SnykVulnerability scanning across code, dependencies, containers, and IaCBazel, C/C++, Dart, Elixir, Go, Java, Kotlin, JavaScript, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, Swift, TypeScript, VB.NETWeb, desktop, mobile applications4.9k550k+ weekly✅✅CheckovMisconfiguration scanning for IaCAnyWeb applications7k1+ million weekly✅❌
Time to dig into these tools (in random order)!
Automated Test Frameworks
More than a specific shift-left testing tool, this represents a category of tools. Specifically, it encompasses all frameworks you can use to write manual test scripts in your codebase. Examples of such solutions include Selenium, pytest, Playwright, Jest, Mocha, and JUnit.
In most cases, these technologies come with everything you need to implement one or more specific types of tests in your application. They offer an API for writing tests, assertion libraries, test runners, test reporting capabilities, and additional features.
For additional details, check out our software engineering testing guides.
🧪 Testing scenarios covered: Manual testing via unit tests, integration tests, smoke tests, component tests, E2E tests, and more
💻 Supported programming languages: Depends on the chosen tool, but there is at least one testing framework available for all major programming languages.
🌐 Types of applications supported: Web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, and more
⭐ GitHub stars: Some of these tools, like Playwright, have over 65k stars
📥 Downloads: Some tools, such as Jest, have over 24 million weekly downloads
👍 Pros:
- All-in-one testing solutions that provide complete testing capabilities
- Integration with CI/CD pipelines
- Strong community support
👎 Cons:
- Some tools have a steep learning curve
💰 Pricing: The great majority of these tools are free, but some offer advanced features for a fee. For example, Cypress comes with a solution with premium features called Cypress Cloud
OSV-Scanner
OSV-Scanner is a vulnerability scanner developed by Google in Go that uses data provided by OSV.dev, a distributed open-source vulnerability database.
OSV-Scanner analyzes your project’s list of dependencies, connects to the OSV.dev database, and reports any vulnerabilities that affect them. Compared to scanners based on closed-source databases, the open nature of OSV.dev ensures that each advisory is sourced from a reliable and public platform. Also, this guarantees that anyone can contribute to these advisories.
🧪 Testing scenarios covered: Dependency inspection for detecting security vulnerabilities
💻 Supported programming languages: C, C++, Dart, Elixir, Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, and Rust
🌐 Types of applications supported: Web applications
⭐ GitHub stars: 6k stars
📥 Downloads: Undisclosed
👍 Pros:
- Work with multiple programming languages and package indexes
- Developed and maintained by Google
- Based on an open-source and distributed database of vulnerabilities
👎 Cons:
- Over 100 issues currently reported on GitHub
💰 Pricing: Free
TruffleHog
TruffleHog is a secret scanning tool that searches deep into code repositories, version histories, S3 directories, Docker images, and more to detect hidden secrets like passwords, API keys, and sensitive credentials.
TruffleHog also features preventive measures, using hooks to stop secrets from being committed, and offers remediation tools with alerts and guides. It minimizes false positives by validating detected credentials.
🧪 Testing scenarios covered: Secret detection
💻 Supported programming languages: Any
🌐 Types of applications supported: Any
⭐ GitHub stars: 15.8k stars
📥 Downloads: Undisclosed
👍 Pros:
- GitHub, S3, directory, GCS, and Docker scanning with 800+ secret detectors available
- Credential verification to avoid false positive
- Multi-branch analysis capabilities
👎 Cons:
- Most powerful features are available only in the premium Enterprise version
💰 Pricing:
- Open-Source: Free
- Enterprise: Premium features available at an undisclosed price (contact the support team for pricing)
Snyk
Snyk is a developer-first, cloud-native security platform that helps identify and fix vulnerabilities across various aspects of software development. The products it offers are :
- Snyk Open Source: Detect and fix open-source vulnerabilities.
- Snyk Code: Identify and resolve security issues in application code.
- Snyk Container: Secure container images and Kubernetes applications.
- Snyk Infrastructure as Code: Address insecure configurations in Terraform and Kubernetes code.
You can integrate the Snyk CLI into your workflow, IDE, or CI/CD pipeline for seamless security testing.
🧪 Testing scenarios covered: Vulnerability detection in dependencies, code, containers, and configurations
💻 Supported programming languages: Bazel, C.C++, Dart and Flutter, Elixir, Go, Java, Kotlin, Javascript, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, Swift, Typescript, and VB.NET
🌐 Types of applications supported: Web applications, desktop applications, and mobile apps
⭐ GitHub stars: 4.9k stars
📥 Downloads: 550k+ weekly downloads
👍 Pros:
- Support for multiple shift-left security tools
- Simple CI/CD integration
- Dedicated plugins for integration directly in popular IDEs like Visual Studio Code, Intellij IDEs, and Eclipse
👎 Cons:
- Requires a Snyk account to work
- Not a fully open-source vulnerability database
💰 Pricing:
- Free: For individual developers and small teams (free forever)
- Team: For development teams looking to build security (contact sales for pricing)
- Enterprise: For standardizing developer-first security across an organization (contact sales for pricing)
Checkov
Checkov is an open-source security tool that scans cloud infrastructure configurations for misconfigurations. It helps identify security and compliance issues in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) platforms, preventing potential vulnerabilities from being introduced into cloud environments.
The IaC providers supported by Checkov features Terraform, Terraform plan, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, ARM Templates, Serverless, Helm, and AWS CDK.
In addition to misconfiguration scanning, Checkov can also detect vulnerabilities in open-source packages and container images.
🧪 Testing scenarios covered: Code misconfiguration detection, dependency vulneraribility detection
💻 Supported programming languages: Any
🌐 Types of applications supported: Web applications
⭐ GitHub stars: 7k stars
📥 Downloads: 1+ million weekly downloads
👍 Pros:
- Comes with over 1,000 built-in policies
- Easy integration into existing developer workflows
- Trusted by Prisma Cloud Application Security
👎 Cons:
- Requires Python to work
💰 Pricing: Free
Honorable Mentions
Other shift-left testing tools worth mentioning are:
- Trivy: A security scanner that checks for vulnerabilities in container images, file systems, and Git repositories. It can also execute IaC scanning to detect misconfigurations. Discover more in our tutorial on continuous container vulnerability testing with Trivy.
- SonarQube: A tool for continuous code quality and security inspection. It analyzes source code to detect code smells, bugs, and security vulnerabilities across multiple programming languages. Find out more in our guide on SonarQube.
Conclusion
In this guide, you learned about the importance of integrating testing as early as possible in the development lifecycle. As demonstrated, this methodology offers significant benefits, such as reduced costs and faster release times. However, achieving these advantages requires the right tools. Here, you discovered the best open-source shift-left testing tools to facilitate the automation of testing in applications still in development.
Originally published at https://semaphoreci.com on October 29, 2024.
