What Got Wrong in Testing Quadrants!

Bangalore: Although Brian Marick was the first to introduce the Testing Quadrant, however, it continues to be a chaotic source. Quadrants was further discussed by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory in “Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams” and in “Continuous Delivery” by Jez Humble and David Farley.

With regards to the quadrants, Markus Gartner, Software Craftsman who specializes in Testing has shared a write-up on Elisabeth Hendrickson’s keynote at CAST 2012 which is very informative.

Here is a video of Elisabeth’s keynote. It’s worth to watch!

Here the labels of the quadrants are new and different from Brian Marick’s original write down.

On the left-hand side the confirmatory tests that are technology-facing are the unit tests and those class-level integration tests that developers write. These facilitate the development of the project.

In the second quadrant are the expectations of the business. Gartner said “Usually I try to express most of them in the form of executable specifications that I can automate. And I can also imagine other business-facing expectations that I cannot automate that probably fall in here, like reliability of the software product.”

In the third quadrants on the top right are tests that investigate the risks concerning the external quality of the product. Gartner Exploratory Tests along with usability tests and end-to-end functionality falls in this category.

The fourth quadrant consists of internal qualities for the code like changeability, maintainability and design flaws like code smells.