Abstract: Abstract: DevOps practitioners regularly talk about “shifting left” - thinking about scalability, security, QA, Ops, etc, earlier in the software engineering process. Doing so allows issues to be addressed earlier, and leads to more stable software, lower costs, and a higher developer velocity. This talk will show that the shift-left mentality is perhaps more fundamental: “shifting-left” encapsulates a fundamental tradeoff between fidelity in defect finding and defect cost, both for defects that are found and those that slip through. Your process is most effective when you’ve shifted-left defect finding and product fitness practices in such a way to ensure that most releases are quick, easy, non-events. When viewed as a currency, this concept ties final product fitness with standard engineering workflow practices, and “shifting left” emerges as more than a buzzword - it’s a fundamental recognition of a real truth in Software Engineering as a discipline. Bio:Titus is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, where he has worked since 2010. At Google, he is the library lead for Google’s C++ codebase: 250 million lines of code that will be edited by 12K distinct engineers in a month. He served several years as the chair of the subcommittee for the design of the C++ standard library. For the last 9 years, Titus and his teams have been organizing, maintaining, and evolving the foundational components of Google’s C++ codebase using modern automation and tooling. Along the way he has started several Google projects that are believed to be in the top 10 largest refactorings in human history. That unique scale and perspective has informed all of his thinking on the care and feeding of software systems. His most recent project is the book “Software Engineering at Google” (aka “The Flamingo Book”), published by O’Reilly in early 2020.