What Is Exploratory Testing?

What Is Exploratory Testing?

Exploratory testing involves entire removal of the test scripts or relaxation of their rigidness. Testing specialists may deal with the app as they like and make use of the information provided by the program so that to react, alter course, learn about the app and generally explore its functionality without restriction. However, some believe it is an ad hoc technique; nevertheless, a skilled and talented exploratory tester can make the most of it. Lawyers disagree with the fact that the human brain can be used at full capacity to detect defects and verify functionality without prejudiced constraints.

Testers that apply exploratory techniques tend to use specialized documentation. Test cases, test results, test scripts, test scenarios and test documentation are developed as tests themselves are being conducted, rather than documented up front and completely in a test plan. Keystroke recording and screen capture tools are best suited to record the exploratory testing result. Since this testing is done manually we need not to use automation tools for its execution. In fact, even those who build furniture by hand prefer to do this work with the help of power tools. Test cases should be handcrafted in the same way. Manual testing specialists who employ debuggers, debug codes, proxies, debug builds, and the like are still performing manual testing, these people are just being rational about this process.

Cross-browser testing services are intended to verify web projects for compatibility with different browsers.

Exploratory testing is especially appropriate for today’s web app development based on agile methods. Due to shortness of development cycles there is still little time left to write and maintain scripts in a formal way. It is no secret that features and functions evolve too fast therefore a desired attribute is to minimize the number of development artifacts. But if the test case is a perfect candidate for rejection why write it on a first-priority basis?? Are you not about to spend more time on maintenance of test cases than actually on test run?

The disadvantage of exploratory testing consists in the fact that it takes long, namely, there is a risk of testers’ wasting plenty of time strolling around the app trying to understand what to test and making efforts to uncover defects. If there is no structure, preparation and guidance it may result in a great deal of useless hours and repeated testing of the same functionality again and again, especially when many testers or testing teams are the participants.