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Exploratory Testing

The Honest Manual Writer Heuristic

Want a quick idea for a burst of activity that will reveal both bugs and opportunities for further exploration? Play “Honest Manual Writer”. Here’s how it works: imagine you’re the world’s most organized, most thorough, and—above all—most honest documentation writer. Your client has assigned you to write a user manual, including both reference and tutorial material, that describes the product or a particular feature of it. The catch is that, … Read more

On Scripting

A script, in the general sense, is something that constrains our actions in some way. In common talk about testing, there’s one fairly specific and narrow sense of the word “script”—a formal sequence of steps that are intended to specify behaviour on the part of some agent—the tester, a program, or a tool. Let’s call that “formal scripting”. In Rapid Software Testing, we also talk about scripts and scripting in … Read more

Exploratory Testing 3.0

This blog post was co-authored by James Bach and me. In the unlikely event that you don’t already read James’ blog, I recommend you go there now. The summary is that we are beginning the process of deprecating the term “exploratory testing”, and replacing it with, simply, “testing”. We’re happy to receive replies either here or on James’ site.

Very Short Blog Posts (12): Scripted Testing Depends on Exploratory Testing

People commonly say that exploratory testing “is a luxury” that “we do after we’ve finished our scripted testing”. Yet there is no scripted procedure for developing a script well. To develop a script, we must explore requirements, specifications, or interfaces. This requires us to investigate the product and the information available to us; to interpret them and to seek ambiguity, incompleteness, and inconsistency; to model the scope of the test … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (11): Passing Test Cases

Testing is not about making sure that test cases pass. It’s about using any means to find problems that harm or annoy people. Testing involves far more than checking to see that the program returns a functionally correct result from a calculation. Testing means putting something to the test, investigating and learning about it through experimentation, interaction, and challenge. Yes, tools may help in important ways, but the point is … Read more

Evaluating Testing: The Qualitative Way

Evaluating Testing: The Qualitative Way | Michael Bolton | STAREAST

For years, testers and managers alike have wrestled with the problem of evaluating software products and testing efforts, often using approaches derived from manufacturing, construction, and physical sciences. These approaches have been only partially successful because software products aren’t physical products. Rather, software is part of a complex web of relationships among programs, computing equipment, networks, and, most importantly, people.

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Why Would a User Do THAT?

If you’ve been in testing for long enough, you’ll eventually report or demonstrate a problem, and you’ll hear this: “No user would ever do that.” Translated into English, that means “No user that I’ve thought of, and that I like, would do that on purpose, or in a way that I’ve imagined.” So here are a few ideas that might help to spur imagination. The user made a simple mistake, … Read more

What Exploratory Testing Is Not (Part 5): Undocumented Testing

This week I had the great misfortune of reading yet another article which makes the false and ridiculous claim that exploratory testing is “undocumented”. After years and years of plenty of people talking about and writing about and practicing excellent documentation as part of an exploratory testing approach, it’s depressing to see that there are still people shovelling fresh manure onto a pile that should have been carted off years … Read more

What Exploratory Testing Is Not (Part 4): Quick Tests

Quick tests are inexpensive tests that require little time or effort to prepare or perform. They may not even require a great deal of knowledge about the application being tested nor about its business domain, but they can help to develop new knowledge rapidly. Rather than emphasizing comprehensiveness or integrity, quick tests are designed to reveal information in a hurry at a minimal cost. A quick test can be a … Read more

What Exploratory Testing Is Not (Part 3): Tool-Free Testing

People often make a distinction between “automated” and “exploratory” testing. This is like the distinction between “red” cars and “family” cars. That is, “red” (colour) and “family” (some notion of purpose) are in orthogonal categories. A car can be one colour or another irrespective of its purpose, and a car can be used for a particular purpose irrespective of its colour. Testing, whether exploratory or not, can make heavy or … Read more