Quality Hierarchy: Relating Agile Testing with Customer-Driven Practices

Emily Bache has an excellent post describing a Maslow-like hierarchy for quality, inspired by Gojko Adzic. She relates the quality hierarchy with Lean Startup test concepts. I found the integration of these two models to be a very useful way to think about an overall quality strategy, combining agile practices with customer-driven practices.

Emily Bache's diagram relating Quality Hierarchy with Agile Testing Quadrants & Lean Startup Testing Concepts

Emily Bache’s diagram relating Quality Hierarchy with Agile Testing Quadrants & Lean Startup Testing Concepts

The Quality Hierarchy was developed, and explained well, on Gojko’s blog.  The Quality Hierarchy relates quality attributes to the Maslow Hierarchy of needs. In this model, attributes like deployability are equivalent to Maslow’s Physiological needs (such as breathing, food/water). The higher level needs, like successful products equate to self-actualization.   In this model, if you can’t build you software, there is no need to worry about how many stars your app earned in the app store.

Emily extended this model by relating testing practices from the Agile Testing Quadrants and testing practices derived from Lean Startup concepts.

Agile Testing Quadrants

Agile Testing Quadrants

Recently, I’ve been writing about practices for engaging with customers, and found Emily’s post to be a great way to integrate this customer-driven thinking with all of the other things we do in software development to ensure high quality. I’ll be using these ideas to build (and communicate) the context for our quality strategies.

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