We're constantly striving for higher quality, faster delivery, and closer collaboration. In the realm of API development, where contracts and interactions are paramount, these goals often feel like a constant uphill battle. This is where Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) emerges not just as a testing methodology, but as a powerful paradigm for designing, developing, and validating robust Python API systems.
I'm continuing the paradigms circle. The Shift Left paradigm is well-known in the DevOps and QA communities for its philosophy of catching bugs, security issues, and integration problems early in the development lifecycle. But Shift Left is not the only valuable philosophy out there. In fact, in some contexts, other paradigms can be even more effective.
This article introduces several software development paradigms that complement or enhance Shift Left—and may even be more impactful depending on your context.
Before diving into Shift Left, which emphasizes catching bugs, performance, and security issues early in the software development lifecycle, it’s important for new programmers to learn the foundational paradigms that support this philosophy.
These paradigms teach early thinking, good code hygiene, and automation — all of which are building blocks of effective software engineering.