Normally Test Engineers follow the written or documented scenarios depending upon the BRD to test a product during the following releases and this process continues during every sprint but this is not enough for making a product more efficient!
Some people think that Exploratory Testing is all about randomly playing with the app and trying to break it but in actual sense there is much more to the understanding of the terms. Well people often misconfuse Exploratory to Ad-hoc testing, which actually revolves around playing with the application.
What is Exploratory Testing?
Exploratory Testing is a software testing method followed by manual testers to explore the product in creative ways. We follow this to explore the application and discover as many issues or bugs to better understand the application’s use cases.
When a regression based testing process is carried out after every release with the newly added features, there can be many hidden bugs, crashes or even ANR’s. To eliminate these types of defects that are not easily covered in the scope of other tests, exploratory testing is very helpful.
Below are the some of the ways of doing exploratory testing:
- Discover new testing scenarios- Under regular scripted testing, normally testers design the test cases first and later proceed with the test execution. On the contrary, as testers we have to discover, investigate and learn along the simultaneous process of testing and design the scenarios based on the experience we gather.
- Think outside the box- Reserve some time for testing the scenarios (note more than 90 or 120 mins) that you have never tried before during every sprint and this can be achieved by thinking differently and executing out of the box scenarios.
- Select a particular feature / area and focus on it – Every release will be having a new feature add on and thus select a particular feature or area and focus your testing on that feature and this is a good way of making the testing effective. It’s always good to choose a particular functionality to cope up with the time of testing.
- Explore Explore Explore! – When a kid is given a new toy, he/she initially plays with it and then explores it by removing and attaching the parts right!. Similarly it’s always good to explore the product after every release. Such a mindset will make you explore the product more and more , come out with bugs and make the application better.
- Involvement of your team (developers, BAs, PMs, etc) – Employees that aren’t normally testing the application regularly. Chances are, they’ll have some ideas for test scenarios that even our regular QA team members may not think of.
- Document and Track up – At the end of every release, sort and figure out the important test cases, highlight it(along with the Jira ID) and add to the existing Regression Test Suite. Repeat the test scenarios during Detail Testing as well as keep it as a source to find out more such scenarios.
Difference Between Scripted Testing and Exploratory Testing:
| Scripted Testing | Exploratory Testing |
| Here test cases are designed first and then QA proceeds with the execution. | Simultaneously performing test design and execution all done at the same time. |
| Identification of test cases well in advance. | Identification of test cases during the testing cycle. |
| Focuses on prediction, decision making, and involves confirmed testing. | Focuses on adaptability, learning and investigation. |
| Here we have a document to follow the predefined test cases. | Here it depends on instant and spontaneous ways of discovering the scenarios. |
Conclusion:
In conclusion, exploratory testing is a challenging task as it needs time and creative thinking but still this can be achieved with effective planning and allocating a time for implementation of the testing along with standard testing process. I am very sure testers will always find more happiness in doing exploratory testing than the Regression testing because it will help you find hidden defects in unusual scenarios/circumstances.-That’s the joy of exploring!