A weekly source of software testing news
ISSUE #16 - May 21, 2017
Let’s take a look at exploratory testing which is said to be the most valuable manual testing activity. In the off-topic section you will find a few amusing bugs.
What exploratory testing is and how to do it well:
https://dojo.ministryoftesting.com/lessons/three-digestible-diagrams-to-describe-exploratory-testing
Exploratory testing was well explained by James Bach and Michael Bolton. This post traces the development of their ideas on exploratory testing and arrives at its 3.0 version where ALL testing is defined as exploratory. Per authors, their earlier posts on the subject are best skipped in favor of this one.
http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/1509
A comprehensive 180-slide tutorial by Cem Kaner from 2008, still relevant:
http://www.kaner.com/pdfs/QAIExploring.pdf
What if you don’t want to test like it’s 2008? Outsourcing is passé, crowdsourcing is in vogue now. This case study describes how Poll Everywhere crowdsourced their exploratory testing via RainforestQA service:
Three reasons to do exploratory testing: it finds bugs, bugs, and bugs.
https://www.techwell.com/techwell-insights/2017/03/3-reasons-exploratory-testing-great-agile-teams
One team runs an experiment in testing a new feature via exploratory methods vs scripted tests (i.e. pre-planned manual tests), finds that 25% of bugs found with ET would not have been detected with their usual ST. I thought the use of a mind map for directing ET was an interesting idea.
https://www.stickyminds.com/article/our-experiment-exploratory-testing-case-study
Examples of testing tours used in exploratory testing (of a car selling website https://www.lingscars.com/ which is correctly described as “deeply insane”).
http://testingisbelieving.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/the-four-hour-tester-modelling-as-team.html
A handy Chrome extension that aids in exploratory testing of a Web UI by providing common boundary and edge cases for UI elements:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bug-magnet/efhedldbjahpgjcneebmbolkalbhckfi?hl=en
Puzzles that aim to teach exploratory testing techniques. The goal is to figure out the system’s logic by playing with it.
http://blackboxpuzzles.workroomprds.com/puzzle_07.html
To follow last week’s fun email bugs, here are a few more amusing bug stories.
Story of an “unfixable” bug. You may guess the ending early on… or not:
http://www.ilikebigbits.com/blog/2016/11/22/the-unfixable-bug
My car won’t start when I buy vanilla ice cream (GM bug):
https://www.utest.com/articles/never-underestimate-user-complaints-a-testers-approach
That time a customer reported an error in the map used by Microsoft Flight Simulator:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170418-00/?p=95985
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