Shift Left Testing in ERP Implementation to Maximize Your ROI

ERP projects are notorious for exceeding budgets once the implementation phase begins. Post-implementation, organizations often struggle to keep up with frequent ERP updates, resulting in underutilized investments. This is where shift left testing comes in.  

In this blog, we will discover why it’s time to move beyond the traditional waterfall approach and how embracing shift left testing can maximize your ERP investment while protecting you from compliance breaches.

Common Issues with Waterfall Approach

Testing is traditionally performed at the final stage of the software development process in the traditional waterfall approach. As a result, when bugs are discovered at the later stages of development, they require extensive rework and strategy adjustments, significantly impacting time-to-market and overall project efficiency.

Timeline and budget over-runs

During ERP implementation many organizations follow the traditional waterfall approach where testing is often pushed to the end of the implementation cycle or treated as a "go-live formality" rather than an ongoing activity. This often leads to serious consequences such as timeline and budget overruns as defects discovered in the final stages delay go-live while fixes require additional development and retesting, consuming unplanned resources.  

Low user adoption

McKinsey suggests that only 31% of digital transformations succeed in delivering expected value—meaning almost 70% fall short. One of the reasons is either user acceptance testing (UAT) delayed or improperly executed. For instance, in the waterfall approach, testing was considered as the last stage of development before going live and was performed manually. This makes users unprepared or frustrated — reducing adoption and trust in the ERP system.

Limited Collaboration

When teams work in silos, there isn't enough collaboration among software development teams - developers, testers, and other stakeholders. This made it difficult to identify and fix issues.  

Limited Agility

Organizations adopt ERP systems to drive agility and adaptability. However, relying on traditional manual testing methods slows down their ability to keep pace with updates—ultimately preventing them from maximizing the full value of their ERP investment.

What is Shift Left Testing?

Shift left testing is a software testing approach that involves starting testing activities early in the development process—right from the planning and design stages. Unlike traditional methods where testing is performed after the software is built, shift left testing encourages continuous testing throughout the development lifecycle.

By identifying and fixing defects early in the software development lifecycle, teams can improve software quality, reduce costs, and avoid last-minute surprises before going live. This proactive approach ensures that issues are caught sooner—when they’re easier and less expensive to resolve—resulting in faster and more reliable releases.

Types of Shift Left Testing

Unit Testing: A type of testing that involves testing individual units or components of the software. It helps in identifying and fixing defects at an early stage.

Integration Testing: It is a type of testing that involves testing the interaction between different modules or components of the software. It helps in identifying defects that may arise due to the integration of various components.

API Testing: API Testing is a type of software testing that focuses on verifying that Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) function correctly, reliably, and securely. Instead of testing the user interface, API testing directly examines the logic, performance, and security of backend services.

Contract Testing: It is about validating agreements (or contracts) between services in a distributed system, especially in microservices architecture. It checks whether the consumer (like a front-end app) and the provider (backend service/API) agree on the structure and behavior of requests and responses. It doesn’t test the business logic but ensures that integrations won’t break when services are updated independently.  

User Acceptance Testing: UAT involves testing the software by end-users to determine whether it meets their requirements and expectations. It helps ensure that the software is user-friendly and meets the user's needs.

Shift Left and Shift Right: A Comparison

Shift Left Testing Approach in ERP Implementation

Requirements Gathering Stage

In traditional waterfall testing, the requirements' gathering stage is primarily focused on documenting business needs, process flows, and system expectations. However, this phase remains largely theoretical, as testing teams are typically not involved at this point. This separation leads to a limited understanding of the actual business logic and often results in ambiguous or incomplete requirements being passed down the line.

With the shift left approach, quality assurance begins right from the requirements gathering stage. Testing teams along with business analysts and functional consultants can be involved early on to validate and refine the requirements.

Opkey's process discovery and prebuilt test accelerators allow organizations to validate business requirements during the development cycle. It means that you can identify whether the documented requirements are testable, aligned with business goals, and free from ambiguity. Potential issues can be identified and addressed when they’re easiest and cheapest to fix—laying a solid foundation for the entire ERP implementation.

Process Mapping & Fit-Gap Analysis

The process mapping and fit-gap analysis stage of ERP implementation requires organizations to define their current business processes and identify gaps between existing workflows and the capabilities of the new ERP system. In the traditional development phase, this stage relies heavily on manual documentation, stakeholder interviews, and assumptions—making it prone to oversight or misalignment.  

With shift left testing, process validation begins early by leveraging test automation to capture real-time business activities. Opkey's AI-powered process discovery removes the guesswork by automatically mapping actual user workflows from ERP logs. This not only accelerates Fit-Gap analysis but also ensures accuracy in identifying what to configure, customize, or retire.

Opkey’s self-configuring test scripts use this process data to generate automated tests, helping teams validate business logic even before full configurations are in place. The result is early alignment, fewer surprises in later stages, and a smoother, more confident ERP implementation.

Configuration and Customization Stage

This is the stage where ERP systems are tailored to match an organization’s business needs through system configuration and custom development. The quality is embedded early in the configuration process with shift left testing.  

Opkey’s Configuration Agent enables teams to begin testing ERP configurations as soon as they’re made, not weeks later. This proactive testing helps validate logic, catch misconfigurations, and avoid last-minute surprises.

Opkey's pre-built test cases save the time that would have been spent creating test cases from scratch. As test execution can be facilitated during the configuration stage, Opkey ensures a faster, more accurate, and lower-risk path to go-live.

Maintenance and ERP Updates

ERP implementations often span six months or more—during which vendors may release critical updates or patches. Since project teams are typically focused on implementation activities, keeping pace with these updates becomes challenging. This creates risk, especially if updates are applied post-go-live without adequate testing.

Shift left testing addresses this by enabling teams to build automated regression suites early in the project. These suites ensure you’re fully prepared to validate updates as soon as they’re released, supporting faster, and safer post-go-live changes.  

With Opkey’s AI-powered Impact Analysis, teams can quickly identify which business processes are affected by an update and generate a risk-based test suite that runs autonomously. Instead of waiting for the update to go live, Opkey allows you to simulate and certify patches in advance using reusable test scripts.

Additionally, Opkey helps establish reusable compliance test scenarios, ensuring every update is automatically checked for audit, security, and regulatory requirements—eliminating manual overhead and reducing risk.

How to Get Started with Shift Left Testing

• Your development team should follow the same coding standards, and all developers must be on the same page.

• To begin with shift-left testing, teams need to plan how testing will be integrated from the very beginning of the software development lifecycle. One effective approach is to adopt an agile software development approach, which breaks down the work into small, manageable units called sprints.

• Since shift-left strategy involves frequent testing, it's important to embrace test automation to reduce the pressure on the testing team. Quick and continuous feedback ensures code stability.

Opkey - Your Unfair Advantage for Unbeatable Test Automation 

Opkey is leading the agentic AI revolution in the ERP space. Built on years of real-world ERP expertise, our ERP Lifecycle Optimization Platform is the first of its kind to maximize the power of agentic AI. Leveraging an ERP-specific small language model, combined with advanced process mining, observability, intelligent web automation, and a “human in the loop” methodology, we’ve developed a full digital workforce of specialized agentic AI agents. 

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