Agile testing quadrants is consider to be a tool or a manual, designed by the Brain Marick, which divides the whole agile testing methodology into four basic quadrants. Agile Testing Quadrants help the whole team to communicate and deliver a high quality product in no time. With the help of Agile Testing Quadrants the whole testing process can be explained in a very easy to understand language and the whole team can effectively work on the product.
These Quadrants are:
- Quadrant 1: Technology-facing tests that support the team
- Quadrant 2: Business-facing tests that support the team
- Quadrant 3: Business-facing tests that critique the product
- Quadrant 4: Technology-facing tests that critique the product
The quadrant numbering system does NOT imply any order. You don’t work through the quadrants from 1 to 4, in a waterfall style. It’s just an arbitrary numbering.
Quadrant 1:
- Quadrant 1 consists of all the test cases that are technology driven. These are performed in order to support the team.
- Developers involvement is very important in this quadrant as quality of code is the main focus here.
- Quadrant 1 is associated with Automated testing, and covers the tests such as Unit tests, Component test, API tests and Web Services testing.
- Instant feedback is obtained in this quadrant so that quality of code can be improved easily.
- This quadrant helps to improve the design of the product without affecting its functionality.
Quadrant 2:
- Quadrant 2 consists of all the test cases that are business driven and are performed to support team as well as the customers.
- Most of the projects working starts from this quadrant.
- The main focus of this quadrant is on the business requirements.
- The tester is greatly involved with the customer to gather the requirements in order to build test cases accordingly.
- Quadrant 2 is associated with Functional testing, story testing, prototypes & simulations and pair testing.
- In this quadrant both manual and automated testing is involved to work on business requirements easily.
Quadrant 3:
- Quadrant 3 consists of all the test cases that are business driven and are performed to Critique the product.
- The main focus of this quadrant is to provide feedback to the Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 2.
- Manual testing based on tester logical thinking, intuitions and user requirements is done to evaluate the application.
- Quadrant 3 is associated with Pair testing with customers, Exploratory Testing, Usability Testing, User Acceptance Testing, Collaborative Testing and alpha & beta testing.
Quadrant 4:
- Quadrant 4 consists of all the test cases that are technology-driven and are performed to critique the product
- Quadrant 4 focus mainly on the non-functional requirements such as performance, security, stress, maintainability, stability etc.
- This quadrant is responsible to deliver the final product to the customer.
- This quadrant is associated with performance testing, load testing, stress testing, maintainability testing, infrastructure testing, data migration testing, security testing, reliability testing, recovery testing and many more.