Founder, Total Shift Left
Rishi is the founder of Total Shift Left, with deep expertise in building both technology products and technology services businesses. He has worked with customers including Microsoft and PayPal, and previously scaled Leapwork's India operation from 0 to 250 people across product, sales, and support. He has spent more than a decade designing API test automation and CI/CD platforms for regulated enterprises in BFSI, healthcare, and the public sector — work that informs his writing on self-hosted LLMs, contract testing at scale, and shift-left strategy. He is a frequent author on AI API testing, OpenAPI-driven automation, and on-prem deployment of testing platforms.
How to gate AI-assisted development — why line coverage stops meaning anything, the four checks that hold, and where human review should be spent when volume outruns it.
The 11 best API load testing tools in 2026, compared on scripting language, protocol support, CI/CD fit, and pricing model — free/open source and commercial.
The MCP threat model and the test cases that cover it — tool poisoning, confused deputy, token passthrough, session hijacking, DNS rebinding and excessive agency, with runnable assertions for each.
MCP versus REST from a testing point of view — protocol, contract discovery, caller behaviour, error channels, security surface and what your existing API test skills carry over unchanged.
A complete API testing checklist across functional, security, and performance dimensions — every item explained, mapped to what actually breaks in production, with a downloadable version for CI/CD gating.
A practical guide to testing Model Context Protocol servers — the handshake, tools/list and tools/call, schema assertions, error mapping, transport differences, and the security cases unique to MCP.
How to run API tests inside a Kubernetes cluster — Jobs, Helm test hooks, Argo CD PostSync, ephemeral namespaces per PR, RBAC and collecting results.
A Cypress API testing tutorial: cy.request() basics, chaining requests with aliases, custom commands for auth, parametrized tests, and running the suite in CI/CD — with working JavaScript for every example.
The 10 best public and dummy APIs for testing in 2026 — fake CRUD data, HTTP behavior simulation, real production-grade APIs, and one built specifically for test-automation practice.
