Shift Right Testing
Quality at every stage. Resilience in every release. Flawless experiences every time.
What is shift right testing?
A release can pass every pre-production test and still fail in front of customers. Live traffic, real data and real dependencies behave differently from any test environment.
Shift right testing verifies software in production: a change reaches a small share of real traffic first, engineers watch customer journeys and business metrics, and the release rolls back on a signal. It complements shift-left testing and does not replace it.
AI-assisted development is sending more code to production, faster. DORA’s 2025 research found that AI adoption now goes with higher delivery throughput but is still associated with increasing instability. More of that code has to be verified where it runs.
Services
What does shift right testing include?
Canary releases
A defect that reaches every customer at once becomes an incident. A canary release exposes a change to a small share of production traffic and compares latency, error rates and business metrics with the stable version.
Feature flags
Some changes must be switched off in seconds, without a new deployment. Feature flags separate a feature’s release from its code deployment. A feature can go to chosen users first, roll out gradually and switch off at once.
Synthetic monitoring
Failures often show in a customer journey before they show in a server metric. Synthetic monitoring tests the availability, consistency and performance of services, applications, web pages and APIs on a schedule. We run journeys such as login, search and payment around the clock from 180+ locations and alert with business context.
Chaos engineering
Most teams learn how their system handles a failure only when the failure happens. Chaos engineering injects controlled failures into a system to check that it handles disruption. We start in pre-production and move to controlled production experiments as your team matures, as set out in our chaos engineering blueprint for banks.
Platforms and partners
Which tools run shift right testing?
Datadog
Real user monitoring and synthetic tests inside Datadog, deployed and run by our engineers.
Watermelon
SRE and chaos testing in one low-code platform, run by our engineers from Watermelon.
Insights
Challenges we’ve met
Success Stories
Latest Insights
Banking & Financial Services
QKTech’s Monitoring Solution Provides Consistent Insight into Payment Gateway Journey Performance
Learn more
FAQs
Common questions about shift right testing
These answers cover what release managers and reliability leads ask us first.
What is shift right testing?
Shift right testing verifies software in production. A change reaches a small share of real traffic first, engineers watch journeys and business metrics, and the release rolls back on a signal.
How is shift right different from shift left?
Shift left tests earlier in development. Shift right tests after release, in production. Programs need both, because a pre-production environment cannot reproduce live traffic, data and dependencies.
Is testing in production safe?
It is safe when the limits are set first. A canary limits how many customers see a change, a feature flag switches it off at once and rollback criteria are agreed before release. Chaos tests start in pre-production and move to production only when the team is ready.
What is a canary release?
A canary release is a progressive rollout that splits traffic between the version already deployed and the new one. The team compares the two on errors, latency and business metrics before widening the rollout.
What is synthetic monitoring?
It runs scripted transactions, such as login, search or payment, against production on a schedule. It finds a broken journey before customers report it.
Talk to a Digital Reliability lead
Describe your next release and how it reaches production today. We will reply with the checks we would add first.