Exploratory Testing can be justified when you explore what not to do by hand

I was reading this post titled "Convince my boss to let me do exploratory testing", while most of what is said in it makes direct sense, I want to add a small point through this post.

Let us say, a tester has to test a text field with the below cases:

1. It has to be tested with multiple languages like English, Hebrew, Arabic, Kannada and Devanagiri.

2. It has an upper limit for its length, say 40 characters, and the tester wants to prepare strings with 40 characters and 41 characters (and also need to know, if a string gets truncated, where it got truncated).

Naturally the tester may ask for a lot of time to prepare the inputs that drive these tests.

It could be a tester who does everything manually, or a tech-savvy tester who want to develop scripts to accomplish the same, it takes time; and I consider that as "non testing time".

So, there is a desperate need for a tool that can aid the tester to do that.

Today, http://www.testersdesk.com/ has a toolkit named "Common Test Data Generators" which help them on that aspect. It is free for the entire testing community.

As you can see, we named it as "common" test data generators instead of hyping the simple things it does.

No, this post is not about TestersDesk.com, because it does a lot more than what is written here.

Exploratory Testing can be justified when you explore what not to do; i.e., the right ways of saving (or escaping from) some time needed in scripted testing.

And of course, the mixing proportions of testing time have to rightly balance scripted and exploratory testing, and there is no "this" or "that" type of testing, by itself, that can reveal all the defects.

Enjoying and respecting the fact that we are human beings,
Ashwin.

Ten Current Note-worthy Trends in the Application of Technology in Software Test Engineering

On September 27th 2008, at Microsoft (Gachibowli-Hyderabad-India), HYSEA Products' forum has conducted an excellent event on Software Product Testing. HYSEA is a great blessing to Hyderabad IT industry and beyond.

I have given a seminar on "Ten Current Note-worthy Trends in the Application of Technology in Software Test Engineering".

Some 400 attendees made their presence and I was deeply excited about having such a very focused event on Software Testing (first such thing in Hyderabad I guess, other than the seminars I have given in other events that were not necessarily only for testing).

Ramesh Loganathan (MD, Progress Software India) has invested interest and energy to make the event happen. Speakers from different Hyderabad based companies gave nice presentations on various topics.

I spoke for an hour (please see the below presentation) sharing my opinions on how currently technology is being used in test engineering. I ended my talk contemplating why we cannot have an aviation-style black-box as a part of software black-box testing so that the problem of irreproducible bugs is more seriously addressed at the source. There is a note from Microsoft sharing the very same viewpoint, published on September 29th 2008. VMWare has a feature of this sort in its world, and it is a good news that the Windows OS itself will have it soon through Visual Studio, making it more real.

The presentation

As good as it gets!