In the interview with the Coding QA guys that was the subject of my last post, James Bach refers exploratory testing as parallel learning test design, test execution and learning, and said that exploratory approaches are epitomized by loops. Where do loops happen in exploratory testing? In fact, exploratory testing includes both looping and branching. When we’re testing in an exploratory way, we may branch away from the current path … Read more
Several months back, James Bach did an interview with the CodingQA guys, Matthew Osborn and Federico Silva Armas. In the interview, James talks about the skills of exploratory testing, sex education (now do I have your attention?) and how to use session-based test management with minimal overhead and maximum credibility. I’m surprised at how few people have heard about the podcast, so I’m drawing attention to it here. It runs … Read more
In this blog post, my colleague James Bach talks about logging and its importance in support of exploratory testing. Logging takes care of one part of the accountability angle, and in an approach like session-based test management (developed by James and his brother Jon), the test notes and the debrief take care of another part of it. Logging records what happened from the perspective of the test system. Good logging … Read more
Over the last several months, B.J. Rollison has been delivering presentations and writing articles and blog posts in which he cites a paper Defect Detection Efficiency: Test Case Based vs. Exploratory Testing [DDE2007], by Juha Itkonen, Mika V. Mäntylä and Casper Lassenius (First International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, pp. 61-70; the paper can be found here). I appreciate the authors’ intentions in examining the efficiency of exploratory … Read more
Excellent testers recognize that excellent testing is not merely a process of confirmation, verification, and validation. Excellent testing is a process of exploration,discovery, investigation, and learning. A correspondent that I consider to be an excellent tester (let’s call him Al) works in an environment where he is obliged by his managers to execute overly structured, highly confirmatory scripted tests. Al wrote to me recently, saying that he now realizes why … Read more
A little while ago, I mentioned that I’d be writing more about session-based test management (SBTM). For me, one thing that’s great about having a community of students and colleagues is that they can save me lots of time and work. Selena Delesie took the Rapid Software Testing course from me a few years back (that is, she was a student). Since then, she has taken Rapid Testing and its … Read more
In a Webinar that he did for uTest on December 10, 2009, James Whittaker mused aloud about what a great idea it would be to structure exploratory testing and capture ideas about it in a repository for sharing with others. It seems to me that one ideal version of that would take the form of a bibliography in a book about exploratory testing, but apparently that’s not available. Yet I … Read more
And now for the immodest part of the EuroSTAR 2009 Test Lab report: I won the Best Bug award, although it’s not clear to me which bug got the nod, since I reported several fairly major problems. I tested OpenEMR. For me, one candidate for the most serious problem would have been a consistent pattern of inconsistency in input handling and error checking. I observed over a dozen instances of … Read more
At the EuroSTAR 2008 conference, I gave a talk entitled, “Two Futures of Software Testing” which was rated as the highest-scoring track session at the conference. Conference attendees also chose the talk as the winning entry for the CapGemini Award for Innovation. Here I provide a number of answers to questions that people have asked since the presentation. Q: How can we predict the future of software testing?A: Well, we … Read more
An article from a while back on StickyMinds entitled How To Choose Between Scripted and Exploratory Testing refers to a bunch of factors in making choices between scripted testing and exploratory testing. The problems start early: “As a test manager or engineer, you may be considering whether or not to use exploratory testing on your next project.” If you’re not planning on investigating any problems that you find, I suppose … Read more