Monday, 23 May 2016

The beauty of documented exploratory testing

How many times have you ever had to go back and check test logs for when something was tested last time? You might if an error occurs in production, but the only benefit you will get is probably who to blame for forgetting something. Dale Carnegie (author of “How To Win Friends And Influence People, 1936”)didn’t think that was a good idea, and me neither. People who screw up usually know when they have done so and feel pretty bad when they do.

A few years back, I started to use something we called documented exploratory testing as the sole way of testing our services.


It's simply exploratory testing with the addition of notes. The tester writes down some notes during his testing, and saves them to our "test log folder". Any tester is using notes while testing a rather large and complicated service, on paper or other media his or she prefers.  These notes serve a testing log for us, and help us check of the traceability “requirement”. By doing this we can focus on actual testing, and “skip” the paperwork, and that’s a lot more fun.



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