An exploration into Exploratory Testing

To explain something that everybody knows is one of the hardest things to do. Same is the case with exploratory testing. Exploratory testing is nothing but testing the software without any formal plans or schedules. And hence this is most useful when we have very short time to test the application.

Exploratory testing is just like a tourist exploring any place. And you would agree to me in that all the tourists (business tourist, medical tourist, cultural tourist) will explore their places of interest in different manners. Same is the case with exploratory testing. The exploration you do depends on the type of application you test. Some of the tours in exploratory testing are so simple that you would have been doing it all these while. Tours are nothing but patterns or strategies that you follow during your test. Each tester would have a technique to find out which the most important tests are and all skilled testers would know, which are the ways to test, so that most number of hidden bugs can be uncovered. If analyzed carefully these would follow some pattern. These patterns are nothing but tours.

These tours have been studies carefully by experts and have been classified and documented.

Some tours in exploratory testing:

•   Antisocial tours – Doing things that should not be done
•   Supermodel tour –Is the application under test fit to be a “super” model ?
•  Intellectual tour –ask hard questions 

There are many more tours that can aid you in exploratory testing apart from the ones listed above.

So depending of the application under test and the type of testing that you are doing, you can decide or choose on the tours that you would like to follow. For e.g. you are performing a usability test of a web application, then one of the best tour you could use is the supermodel tour.

So the whole idea of practicing exploratory testing is that, you explore you application in a structured way (rather that ad-hoc) and uncover the most important bugs.