Advertisements
Recurring themes in the management of an effective exploratory test cycle are tester, test strategy, test reporting and test mission. The scripted approach to testing attempts to mechanize the test process by taking test ideas out of a test designer's head and putting them on paper. There's a lot of value in that way of testing. But exploratory testers take the view that writing down test scripts and following them tends to disrupt the intellectual processes that make testers able to find important problems quickly. The more we can make testing intellectually rich and fluid, the more likely we will hit upon the right tests at the right time. That's where the power of exploratory testing comes in: the richness of this process is only limited by the breadth and depth of our imagination and our emerging insights into the nature of the product under test. In the rapid testing classes at Satisfice, Inc., we have equipment that watches testers invent tests in real-time. When the instructor makes a new suggestion for what to test, or provides new information to the testers about the product, we observe and measure how a roomful of exploratory testers reacts to that information. Free from the encumbrance of pre-documentation, they immediately incorporate new ideas into their tests.
Scripting has its place. I can imagine testing situations where efficiency and repeatability are so important that we should script or automate them. For example, in the case where a test platform is only intermittently available, such as a client-server project where there are only a few configured servers available and they must be shared by testing and development. The logistics of such a situation may dictate that we script tests carefully in advance to get the most out of every second of limited test execution time. Exploratory testing is especially useful in complex testing situations, when little is known about the product, or as part of preparing a set of scripted tests. The basic rule is this: exploratory testing is called for any time the next test you should perform is not obvious, or when you want to go beyond the obvious. In my experience, that's most of the time.
