exploratory testing

Articles

Icon showing one end to another Endgame Testing: Exploring Your Agile Product End to End

The main goal of endgame testing is to test the system end to end from the user's perspective. This should ensure continuity between components developed by different teams, continuity in user experience, and successful integration of new features. Endgame testing will often identify gaps that are difficult to discover inside agile teams, including flows across the product.
Doron Bar's picture Doron Bar
September 20, 2017
The Two Sides of Software Testing: Checking and Exploring

Is testing about checking against system requirements, or is it about exploring the software? In this article, Elisabeth Hendrickson explains a valuable truth often clouded by this debate—good testing takes advantage of both of these approaches.
Elisabeth Hendrickson's picture Elisabeth Hendrickson
February 21, 2011
Continuous Integration and Testing

Lisa Crispin explains in this article how CI has become an absolute necessity for any software development team in this day and age. For those who have yet to fully embrace CI, this article gives you some great reasons you should, along with some helpful resources to get you started.
Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin
April 29, 2009
Agile Testing as if People Mattered

As a test professional in waterfall, I was used to getting the code much later and buggier than I expected and being under tremendous pressure to finish my testing before the go-live date hit. Then one day, I found out that there was a better way. Testers could be involved much earlier in the lifecycle, they could participate in requirements and design decisions as they happened, and the code could actually be unit tested before I received it! Heaven? Nope, agile.
Daryl Kulak's picture Daryl Kulak
August 25, 2008
More

Better Software Magazine Articles

How Much Is Enough?—Exploring Exploratory Software Testing

Exploratory testers design and execute tests in the moment, starting with an open mission and investigating new ideas as they arise. But how do we know when to stop? The first step is to recognize that we can't know when we're done, because any approach to answering the stopping question is necessarily heuristic.
Michael Bolton's picture Michael Bolton
February 27, 2008
The Truth About Exploratory Testing

Forget what you thought you knew about exploratory testing. Dion Johnson is disturbed by its exploitation by those who wish to escape accountability and forgo up-front planning, but says that exploratory testing and scripted testing can work together to enhance quality practices.
Dion Johnson's picture Dion Johnson
July 5, 2006
Behind the Screens

Web services can't be tested through manual means, can they? With the right tools they can. Find out how a solid background in exploratory testing and Ruby's scripting language can make it possible.
Brian Marick
June 2, 2004
Inside the Mind of an Exploratory Tester

Among the hardest things to explain is something that everyone already knows. We all know how to listen, how to read, how to think, and how to tell anecdotes about the events in our lives. As adults, we do these things every day. Yet the level possessed by the average person of any of these skills may not be adequate for certain special situations.Exploratory tester James Bach describes eight key skills that expert explorers possess, and how you can develop them too.
James Bach's picture James Bach
February 16, 2004
More

Interviews

Bart Knaack discusses the Test Lab at STARWEST 2015 The Test Lab: STARWEST 2015 Interview with Bart Knaack and Wade Wachs
Video

In this interview, TechWell speaks with Bart Knaack, test advisor at Professional Testing, and his partner at the Test Lab, Wade Wachs. Bart gave a keynote at STARWEST titled "The Survival Guide for Testers and Test Managers."
Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine
November 20, 2015
A Firsthand Agile Transition Success Story: An Interview with Penny Wyatt

In this interview, Penny Wyatt discusses her Agile Development Conference West session, "Transform Your Agile Test Process to Ship Fast with High Quality," to share some of the ways she and her team achieved success, and how they—and you—can continue to develop and grow together.
Noel Wurst's picture Noel Wurst
April 30, 2013
Exploratory Testing in an Agile World: An Interview with Matt Barcomb

Matt Barcomb works at LeanDog where he is passionate about building collaborative cross-functional teams and finding ways to make the business-software universe a better place to work, play, and do business. Heather Shanholtzer talked to Matt about exploratory testing in an agile project.
Heather Shanholtzer's picture Heather Shanholtzer
May 4, 2012
More

Conference Presentations

The Many Flavors of Exploratory Testing

The concept of exploratory testing is evolving, and different interpretations and variations are emerging and maturing. These range from the pure and original thoughts of James Bach, later expanded to session-based exploratory testing by Jon Bach, to testing tours described by James Whittaker, to the many different ways test teams across the world have chosen to interpret exploratory testing in their own contexts. Though it appears to be simple, exploratory testing can be difficult to introduce into a traditional organization where testers are familiar only with executing scripted test cases and where the concept of exploration and creative testing may be somewhat foreign. At the same time, organizations need to address the challenges of traceability and reporting, moving from traditional ways to a more exploratory approach.
Gitte Ottosen, Sogeti Denmark
Leverage Your Test Automation ROI with Creative Solutions

Typical automated tests perform repetitive tasks quickly and accurately. However, with some creativity, you can leverage automation to dramatically increase its ROI. Doug Hoffman demonstrates how to employ test automation for testing activities that are impossible with manual testing.
Doug Hoffman, Software Quality Methods, LLC
Testing Lessons Learned from the Great Detectives

What the great detectives have taught me about testing.
Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Chartering the Course: Guiding Exploratory Testing

Charters help you guide and focus exploratory testing. Well-formed charters help testers find defects that matter and provide vital information to stakeholders about the quality and state of the software under test. Rob Sabourin shares his experiences defining different exploratory testing charters for a diverse group of test projects. For example, reconnaissance charters focus on discovering application features, functions, and capabilities; failure mode charters explore what happens to applications when something goes wrong. In addition, you can base charters on what systems do for users, what users do with systems, or simply the requirements, design, or code. Rob reviews key elements of a well-formed testing charter-its mission, purpose, focus, understanding, and scope. Learn how to evolve a test idea into an exploratory charter using examples from systems testing, Scrum story testing, and developer unit testing.
Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com
More

AgileConnection is a TechWell community.

Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.