Agile Testing Quadrants: What Are They and How to Use Them

What are Agile Testing Quadrants?

Agile Testing Quadrant is a tool or manual developed by Brain Marick that divides the overall Agile testing methodology into four basic quadrants. The Agile Testing Quadrant helps the whole team communicate and deliver quality products in the shortest possible time. With the help of the Agile Testing Quadrant, the entire testing process can be explained in a language that is very easy to understand, allowing the whole team to work effectively on the product. The four agile testing quadrants are:

Quadrant 1: The first quadrant suggests some techniques to support your team from a technical perspective. The emphasis is on testing code using unit tests and unit tests.

Quadrant 2: This quadrant also proposes some techniques to support teams, but we look at them from a business perspective here. The goal is to align testing activities with business rules using functional tests, samples, story tests, prototypes, and simulations.

Quadrant 3: The third quadrant advises techniques to help teams critique products by focusing on the business perspective. Recommended techniques include exploratory testing, scenario testing, usability testing, user acceptance testing, and alpha and beta testing.

Quadrant 4: In this quadrant, it proposes a methodology focused on critiquing products from a technical perspective. This indicates the use of performance testing, load testing, security testing, and other types of "intelligence testing" such as accessibility, reliability, and portability. 

How to Use Agile Testing Quadrants

To use Agile Testing Quadrants, identify your testing activities and categorize them into appropriate quadrants based on their purpose and focus. This helps create a balanced testing strategy covering different testing aspects such as business requirements, technical considerations, code quality, and test automation. Quadrants also help you prioritize and plan your testing efforts based on the needs of each project. 

You should choose and use one of the techniques shown in this quadrant. Another important point to note is that many other testing techniques may be used that are not listed in this matrix. It's a 20-year-old tool that is still valid and has been updated over the years, but keep in mind that new techniques are constantly being developed that may serve your purpose. The main idea is to understand what kind of tests are applicable in this situation and choose the right test method. 

Agile Testing Quadrants Cases

Case 1

Simple business rule error not found. Agile Testing Quadrant allows you to consider:

Do not select quadrants 1 and 4 because you are trying to fix a business rule bug. These are simple mistakes that have been overlooked. So, the idea is that we need to help the team find more bugs before delivering them to customers. Therefore, we should choose either quadrant 2 or quadrant 3. However, it is shown that the team needed more help, so we can finally choose Quadrant 2. That’s the application of agile testing quadrants.

Case 2

This application is used by millions of users, but this is not the intention. Agile Testing Quadrant allows you to consider:

Do not choose quadrants 1 or 2 because you are looking to test your application in critical situations where many users start using your application. Therefore, we can conclude that we should choose either quadrant 3 or Quadrant 4. However, you can realize that it deals with technical issues, so you can finally decide on quadrant 4.

Case 3

The customer said their application does not work as defined in their requirements. Agile Testing Quadrant allows you to consider:

Do not select quadrants 1 and 4 because you are trying to fix a business rule bug. You need to critique and burden your application and find more bugs before you deliver it to your customers. Therefore, we can conclude that we should choose either quadrant 2 or quadrant 3. However, you can know that it requires criticism of the application, so you can finally decide on quadrant 3.  

Conclusion

The post here focuses on agile testing quadrants. These quadrants provide a structured framework for classifying different types of tests based on their purpose and the level of collaboration required.  Suppose you still feel confused and don’t know what to do exactly, you can choose the software test service from WeTest. It is an intelligent testing tool equipped with agile testing techniques, allowing you to automatically test your applications without much effort and time. Just apply it to make the testing process easier and more accurate.