Shift left is a phrase often heard in software development. There are many ways you can do this. You can get testers involved at the story writing stage or get testers testing on feature branches before the code goes into master. But what can you do though to shift left your automation? Now let's imagine you have someone who writes UI test automation. Let's call them a test automation engineer. Now this person would typically write tests after the developer has finished their work. Now on the face of it this is great, they can write some tests whilst the developer starts on another feature. However, this creates its own problems. If the test automation engineer has questions or finds issues they have to interrupt the developer and get some answers. This feedback loop could be quite long which could delay the releasing of the feature and more importantly delaying the value to the user of that feature. What if there was another way….. Now shifting left is about getting testing pe