The Testing Quadrants continue to be a source of confusion. I heard that Brian Marick was the first to write them down after long conversations with Cem Kaner. Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory refined them in their book on Agile Testing.

I wrote earlier about my experiences with the testing quadrants in training situations a while back. One pattern that keeps on re-occurring when I run this particular exercise is that teams new to agile software development – especially the testers – don’t know which testing techniques to put in the quadrant with the business-facing tests that shall support the team. All there is, it seems, for them is critique to the product. This kept on confusing me, since I think us testers can bring great value. Recently I had an insight motivated by Elisabeth Hendrickson’s keynote at CAST 2012.