Large-scale Exploratory Testing at Microsoft: Let's Take a Tour

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.