The New Agile Testing Quadrants: Bringing Skilled Testers and Developers Together

3/19/2015

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The New Agile Testing Quadrants: Bringing Skilled Testers and Developers Together

James Bach

[email protected]

Michael Bolton

[email protected])

(and with helpful comments from International Society of Software Testing members: Anne-Marie Charrett, James Lyndsay, Simon Morley,

and Ben Kelly)

Marick’s Original

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Dimensions of Crispin/Gregory“Agile Testing Quadrants” Based on Marick

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First, refactor those dimensions…

(This version avoids alienating professional testers and more directly addresses the tension between business and technology “facings.”)

“Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.”

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through…valuable software”

And remind ourselves of the core tactics of Agile…

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And remind ourselves of the core tactics of Agile…

(These are the core tactics as we see them. You may prefer a slightly different list.)

And remind ourselves of the core tactics of Agile…

(These are the core tactics as I see them. You may prefer a slightly different list.)

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This suggests a clockwise cycle…

…and the corners representing enabling patterns.

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(“AS” does not mean AFTER.)

NOTE: Although there is a cyclic tendency to these activities, they overlap, combine, and support each other. The process is less like a ticking clock and more like stirring a cup of coffee.

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Iterations, sprints, releases, or

whatever you want to call them.

Now, let’s create the testing quadrants…

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Each quadrant represents a set of Agile testing activities.

(Testing suffuses Agile development, but the character of the activities is quite different in each of the quadrants.)

(Notice that there are no test techniques or tools listed in the activities. That’s because test techniques and tools do not live in any particular quadrant.)

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“Distance” refers to the difference between one perspective and another. Testing benefits from diverse perspectives. Shallow testing doesn’t need critical distance, but deeper or naturalistic long-form testing tends to require or create more distance from the builder’s mindset.

Deep testing requires critical distance.

EnvisioningSuccess

Anticipating Failure

FocusingMindset

DefocusingMindset

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Central Obstacle Divides Work

Mt. Mindset

NOTE: We do NOT claim that this work must be done by different people, or that the people must have different roles. We DO claim that roles on an agile team (collaborating with each other) are a powerful heuristic for solving the mindset switching problem.

Developer skill focus

Tester skill focus

Business analyst skill focus

Skilled testing and skilled development interact in a “trading zone”

Peter Galison introduced the notion of a trading zone in Science as a situationwherein people from different disciplines try to work together despite their very different and incompatible concepts and language.

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Collins’ Trading Zones Model

Complex Testing Example #1

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