The Art and Mindset of Exploratory Testing
The Essence of Exploratory Testing
Exploratory testing is a method that is difficult to document in writing, based on experience and performed with human predictions, and offers a unique perspective that automated tests cannot cover.
This testing method allows you to analyze your system from different angles by testing it from the user’s perspective as if you were exploring it as if you had never used the application before. These tests enable you to minimize product risks and understand and improve the usability of your application from the user's perspective.
A User-Focused Approach
Analyzing systems from diverse angles and adopting a user’s perspective minimizes risks and enhances software quality.
With Exploratory Testing, unexpected errors can be detected early, and overall testing processes can be improved. Requirements may also be missing from time to time; addressing the application from the user’s perspective requires understanding the demands of the users. With complete domain mastery, using the application with the methods the user will use and fully simulating the user will enable early detection of errors that users will directly encounter and even reveal deficiencies in requirements. With the bugs and improvement suggestions resulting from these tests, you will experience the pleasure of reaching software that makes users happy.
Early Insights
Exploratory testing is particularly effective in the early stages of development before running detailed test cases. Testers can begin exploring the implementation as soon as a function is developed, helping catch critical issues before they become deeply embedded in the system and reducing the cost of fixing bugs later in the development cycle. In this way, a comprehensive testing strategy can be created, both expected and unpredictable.
Being a Master of Product
To achieve high success in exploratory testing, it is an essential requirement that testers have a deep understanding of the purpose of the application, user profiles, and expected behaviors. With this information, effective exploratory testing is possible. Therefore, QA teams are expected to have a solid domain dominance before exploratory tests, where the most efficient and critical errors are caught. Once QA teams become master product users, they can comprehensively examine the software’s behavior by exploring different paths, user interactions, and edge cases. Monitoring user movements can also be a method to master the product. High-performance tools have been developed for this, e.g. FullStory. By integrating your applications with these tools, you can also aim to strengthen exploratory testing by learning real-world scenarios and monitoring the user behavior of QA teams.
Recording the Exploratory Testing
Although exploratory testing is inherently unwritten, it is crucial to document the testing process, including the steps taken in the testing and the defects discovered. This document provides valuable information for future testing and facilitates effective communication for the QA team. Tools with very high features have also been developed for this purpose. For example, with the X-ray Exploratory Testing tool, exploratory tests can be recorded and replayed later. These records both record the test run and provide documentation for later use.
Integrating Exploratory Testing in Agile Environments
In Agile development environments where frequent changes are commonplace, these requests from the QA teams can be handled before the sprint cycles are closed and fully comply with the Agile nature. It is possible to keep up with the Agile environment and aim to provide customer-satisfied sprint reviews with the feedback of QA teams provided with the findings obtained from this exploratory testing perspective, both in grooming, planning, and development within the sprint and with development tasks or bug findings during the development process.
