Agile Testing Quadrants, Tester Tasks and Key Success factors for Agile testing

Tester Tasks:

• Be Proactive
• Benifits
• Do You Really Need this
• Potential Downsides to advanced Preparations
• Advance Clarity
• Customers speak with one voice
• Story size
• Geographically Dispersed Customers and teams
• Examples
• Test Strategies
• Prioritize Defects
• Resources

Key Success Factors:

• Use the Whole-Team Approach
• Adopt an agile testing mind-set
• Automate Regression testing
• Provide and Obtain Feedback
• Build a foundation of core practices
• Collaborate with customers
• Look at the big picture

Agile Testing Quadrants:

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 so that, in our book and when we are talking about the quadrants, we can say “Q1” instead of “technology-facing tests that support the team”. 

Most projects would start with Q2 tests, because those are where you get the examples that turn into specifications and tests that drive coding, along with prototypes and the like. However, I have worked on projects where we started out with performance testing (which is in Q4) on a spike of the architecture, because that was the most important criterion for the feature. If your customers are uncertain about their requirements, you might even do a spike and start with exploratory testing (Q3).

Q3 and Q4 testing pretty much require that some code be written and deployable, but most teams iterate through the quadrants rapidly, working in small increments. Write a test for some small chunk of a feature, write the code, once the test is passing, perhaps automate more tests for it, do exploratory testing on it, do security or load testing on it, whatever, then add the next small chunk and go through the whole process again.

The quadrants are merely a taxonomy to help teams plan their testing and make sure they have all the resources they need to accomplish it. There are no hard and fast rules about what goes in what quadrant. Think through them as you do your release, theme, and iteration planning, so your whole team starts out by thinking about testing first.

Source: "Agile Testing" Book by Lisa and Janet