 |
Home > Detail: Inside the Mind of an Exploratory Tester
Viewing 12-21 of 4176 Collapse Descriptions
Sort by: Date Posted | Title | Content Type | Relevancy
 
COLUMN: What Is Exploratory Testing?
Author(s): James Bach
Summary: Exploratory software testing is a powerful and fun approach to testing. In some situations, it can be orders of magnitude more productive than scripted testing. I haven’t found a tester yet who didn’t, at least unconsciously, perform exploratory testing at one time or another. Yet few of us study this approach, and it doesn’t get much respect in our field. It’s high time we stop the denial, and publicly recognize the exploratory approach for what it is: scientific thinking in real time. Friends, that’s a good thing.
 CONFERENCE MATERIALS: Large-scale Exploratory Testing at Microsoft: Let's Take a Tour
Author(s): James Whittaker, Google
Summary: Manual testing is the best way to find the bugs most likely to bite users badly after a product ships. However, manual testing remains a very ad hoc, aimless process. At a number of companies across the globe, groups of test innovators gathered in think tank settings to create a better way to do manual testing—a way that is more prescriptive, repeatable, and capable of finding the highest quality bugs. The result is a new methodology for exploratory testing based on the concept of tours through the application under test. In short, tours represent a more purposeful way to plan and execute exploratory tests. James Whittaker describes the tourist metaphor for this novel approach and demonstrates tours taken by test teams from various companies including Microsoft and Google. He presents results from numerous projects where the tours were used in critical-path production environments. Join James and learn about the collection of test tours, test cases, and bugs from these case studies and take back recommendations for using tours on your own products.
Conference: STARWEST 2009
CONFERENCE MATERIALS: Toward an Exploratory Testing Culture
Author(s): Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com Inc
Summary: Traditional testing teams often agonize over exploratory testing. How can they plan and design tests without detailed up-front documentation? Stubborn testers may want to quit because they are being asked to move out of their comfort zone. Can a team’s testing culture be changed? Rob Sabourin describes how several teams have undergone dramatic shifts to embrace exploratory testing. Learn how to blend cognitive thinking skills, subject matter expertise, and “hard earned” experience to help refocus your team and improve your outcomes. Learn to separate bureaucracy from thinking and paperwork from value. Explore motivations for change and resistance to it in different project contexts. Leverage Parkinson's Law—work expands to fill the time available—and Dijkstra-s Principle—testing can show the presence of bugs, but not their absence—to inspire and motivate you and your team to get comfortable in the world of exploratory testing.
Conference: STARWEST 2008
CONFERENCE MATERIALS: Exploratory Testing: The Next Generation
Author(s): David Elizondo, Microsoft Corporation
Summary: Exploratory testing is sometimes associated with "ad hoc" testing, randomly navigating through an application. However, emerging exploratory techniques are anything but ad hoc. David Gorena Elizondo describes new approaches to exploratory testing that are highly effective, very efficient, and supported by automation. David describes the information testers need for exploration, explains how to gather that information, and shows you how to use it to find more bugs and find them faster. He demonstrates a faster and directed (not accidental) exploratory bug finding methodology and compares it to more commonly used approaches. Learn how test history and prior test cases guide exploratory testers; how to use data types, value ranges, and other code summary information to populate test cases; how to optimize record and playback tools during exploratory testing; and how exploratory testing can impact churn, coverage, and other metrics.
Conference: STARWEST 2008
CONFERENCE MATERIALS: Session-Based Exploratory Testing-With a Test
Author(s): Brenda Lee, Parallax Inc.
Summary: Session-based exploratory testing is an effective means to test when time is short and requirements are not clearly defined. Is it advisable to use session-based exploratory testing when the requirements are known and documented? How about when the test cases are already defined? What if half of the test team is unfamiliar with the software under test? The answers are yes, yes, yes. Brenda Lee explains how her team modified the session-based exploratory testing approach to include requirements and test cases as part of its charter. In one instance, during the short seven-day test window the team validated forty-one out of forty-five requirements, executed more than 200 test cases using seventeen charters, and identified fifteen new, significant issues. The team was able to present a high-level test summary to the customer only two days after the conclusion of system test. What did the customer say? "This had to be the shortest system test cycle ever."
- A structured and managed approach for faster system testing
- How session-based exploratory testing works with traditional development projects
- Ways to obtain management support for experimentation
Conference: STARWEST 2007
CONFERENCE MATERIALS: Session-Based Exploratory Testing: A Large Project Adventure
Author(s): George Bliss, Captaris
Summary: Session-based exploratory testing has been proposed as a new and improved approach to software testing. It promotes a risk-conscious culture that focuses on areas where there are likely to be defects and allows for rapid course corrections in testing plans to accommodate testing "discoveries", feature-creep, and schedule changes.
How can a test manager take a highly talented manual testing team, accustomed to running test scripts, and
introduce the agility of an exploratory approach? What can be done to communicate the risks inherent in featurecreep
and schedule changes to senior stakeholders in a meaningful way? Bliss will demonstrate how he successfully
implemented session-based exploratory testing while maintaining and even improving the code quality. Using the
tool he developed (available for free download) and metrics available with this approach, stakeholders get real-time
testing status reports and begin to understand their responsibilities in the process. They then learn how their
decisions actually affect the quality of the product. With their new awareness, project stakeholders are more willing
to negotiate changes that they might otherwise impose on the engineering teams. With session-based exploratory
testing, you will discover that quality rapidly becomes everyone's concern.
Conference: STARWEST 2006
CONFERENCE MATERIALS: Session-Based Exploratory Testing: A Large Project Adventure
Author(s): George Bliss, Captaris
Summary: You know the story: Marketing wants more features, faster release cycles, and release dates that do not slip. Customers want new functions and software that does not break. Testers and developers want to release high quality software with limited resources. Management wants good information to make ship don't ship decisions. What if, facing all of these wants, you could reduce testing time by up to 50% and release better code as evidenced by fewer defects with lower severity after release? George Bliss shows you how a switch from traditional script-based testing to session-based exploratory testing—along with agile development practices and more automation—achieved those results. With session-based exploratory testing, they delivered real-time status updates to management and helped to make the quality of software everyone’s business.
- Improved communication and reporting to stakeholders with session-based exploratory testing
- Spread the decision surrounding release decisions to all critical groups
- Tools for handling the results from session-based exploratory testing
Conference: STAREAST 2006
CONFERENCE MATERIALS: Exploring Exploratory Testing
Author(s): Andy Tinkham, Florida Institute of Technology
Summary: This article discusses what good exploratory testing entails. Discover why testers should plan to use exploratory techniques in their day to day testing activities and how to use risks to define specific exploratory tests. Learn simple heuristics to help in risk identification and how implementing it can benefit you test team.
Conference: STAREAST 2003
CONFERENCE MATERIALS: Exploratory Testing in Pairs
Author(s): James Bach, Satisfice, Inc. and Cem Kaner, Florida Institute of Technology
Summary: Exploratory testing involves simultaneous activities—learning about the program and the risks associated with it, planning and conducting tests, troubleshooting, and reporting results. This highly skilled work depends on the ability of the tester to stay focused and alert. Based on a successful pilot study, Cem Kaner and James Bach discuss why two testers can be more effective working together than apart. Explore the advantages of testing in pairs, including ongoing dialogue to keep both testers alert and focused, faster and more effective troubleshooting, and an excellent opportunity for a seasoned tester to train a novice.
Conference: STARWEST 2001
CONFERENCE MATERIALS: Exploratory Testing in Pairs
Author(s): Cem Kaner, Florida Institute of Technology and James Bach, Satisfice Inc.
Summary: Exploratory testing involves simultaneous activities—learning about the program and the risks associated with it, planning and conducting tests, troubleshooting, and reporting results. This highly skilled work depends on the ability of the tester to stay focused and alert. Based on a successful pilot study, Cem Kaner discusses why two testers can be more effective working together than apart. Explore the advantages of testing in pairs, including ongoing dialogue to keep both testers alert and focused, faster and more effective troubleshooting, and an excellent opportunity for a seasoned tester to train a novice.
Conference: STAREAST 2001
|
Viewing Item 12 of 4176
|  | Nov/Dec 2003 (Vol. 5, Issue 6)
Feature: Testing
Inside the Mind of an Exploratory Tester
By James Bach
  
Summary:
Renowned exploratory tester James Bach describes eight key skills that expert explorers possess, and how you can develop them too.
|
|
|
Access the entire STQE and Better Software magazine archive of over 250 articles by supercharging your membership with a PowerPass!
Learn more about PowerPass.
About the Author James Bach owns Satisfice, Inc., a consulting and training company specializing in rapid software testing techniques. James would like to thank Bret Pettichord and Tracy Balkovic for their comments and encouragement about this article.
|
|
</nobr>.gif)
