Shift Left: Why Quality Needs to Start from Day One
Lessons Learned from conversation with Maryia Tuleika
If you wait until the end of a project to think about quality, it’s already too late.
That’s the hard-earned truth Maryia Tuleika has learned in years of working with both startups and large enterprises.
Maryia specializes in quality engineering and has worked on everything from embedded systems to consumer web apps.
The common pattern she sees? When teams embed a quality mindset from the beginning - during planning, requirements, design - things tend to go smoother. When they don’t, everything eventually catches up with them.
"When no quality is in mind when starting a project... it often goes wrong."
Quality doesn’t just mean automated tests. It means deeply understanding what users want, validating assumptions early, building in accessibility and security checks, and yes - having QA professionals involved from the first requirements doc.
“Quality is embedded in every subprocess that's involved in software engineering... if testers or quality assurance engineers appear only at the end of this chain, then they might miss out on so many details.”
“It takes a lot of time to understand what we need to do. And if we do it right from the first time, it's going to give us a lot of return on investment, because we won’t need to fix it afterwards.”
There are endless studies showing how much more expensive it is to fix bugs later in the lifecycle.
But the insight Maryia emphasizes is even more basic: if you focus on doing things right from the start, you avoid building the wrong thing altogether.
Whether you're in a fast-paced startup or a slow-moving enterprise, quality is cheaper and easier when it's treated as a first-class citizen from day one.
Want to dive deeper? See the whole episode on Youtube or listen wherever you get your podcasts (just search “Software Engineering Tales“)