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Exploratory Testing

Sharper Terms for “Manual Testing”

This is a lightly-edited excerpt from a longer blog post that you’ll find here. I recommend you read it too, but if you’re short on time, here’s the core of it. If you care about understanding the status of your product, you’ll probably care about testing it. You’ll want testing to find out if the product you’ve got is the product you want. If you care about that, you need … Read more

Alternatives to “Manual Testing”: Experiential, Interactive, Exploratory

This is an extension on a long Twitter thread from a while back that made its way to LinkedIn, but not to my blog. Update, 2022/12/07: James Bach and I have recently changed “attended” to “interactive”, to emphasize the tester’s direct interaction with the product that happens during so-called “manual” testing. “Interactive” is more evocative of what’s going on than “attended” is, but it’s also true the tester’s interaction might … Read more

“Manual Testing”: What’s the Problem?

I used to speak at conferences. For the HUSTEF 2020 conference, I had intended to present a talk called “What’s Wrong with Manual Testing?” In the age of COVID, we’ve all had to turn into movie makers, so instead of delivering a speech, I delivered a video instead. After I had proposed the talk, and it was accepted, I went through a lot of reflection on what the big deal … Read more

Exploratory Testing on an API? (Part 4)

As promised, (at last!) here are some follow-up notes on previous installments in the series that starts here. Let’s revisit the original question: Do you perform any exploratory testing on APIs? How do you do it? To review: there’s a problem with the question. Asking about “exploratory testing” is a little like asking about “vegetarian cauliflower”, “carbon-based human beings”, or “metallic copper”. Testing is fundamentally exploratory. Testing is an attempt … Read more

Exploratory Testing on an API? (Part 3)

In the last two posts, I’ve been answering the question Do you perform any exploratory testing on an API? How do you do it? Last time I described the process of learning about factors in the project environment that affect my strategy as I go about the testing of an API. This time, I’ll go deeper, learn more, and begin to interact with the product. That learning and interaction feeds … Read more

Exploratory Testing on an API? (Part 2)

Summary:  Loops of exploration, experimentation, studying, modeling, and learning are the essence of testing, not an add-on to it. The intersection of activity and models (such as the Heuristic Test Strategy Model) help us to perform testing while continuously developing, refining, and reviewing it. Testing is much more than writing a bunch of automated checks to confirm that the product can do something; it’s an ongoing investigation in which we … Read more

Exploratory Testing on an API? (Part 1)

In one forum or another recently, a tester, developer or DevOps person (I wasn’t sure which of these he/she was) asked: Do you perform any exploratory testing on APIs? How do you do it? Here’s an in-depth version of the reply I gave, with the benefit of links to deeper material. To begin: application programming interfaces (APIs) are means by which we can use software to send commands to a … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (34): Checking Inside Exploration

Some might believe that checking and exploratory work are antithetical. Not so. In our definition, checking is “the algorithmic process of operating and observing a product, applying decision rules to those observations, and reporting the outcome of those decision rules”. We might want to use some routine checks, but not all checks have to be rote. We can harness algorithms and tools to induce variation that can help us find … Read more

Finding the Happy Path

In response to yesterday’s post on The Happy Path colleague and friend Albert Gareev raises an important issue: Until we sufficiently learned about the users, the product, and the environment, we have no idea what usage pattern is a “happy path” and what would be the “edge cases”. I agree with Albert. (See more of what he has to say here.) This points to a kind of paradox in testing … Read more