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In the realm of Quality Assurance (QA), traditional testing methodologies often follow structured, predefined test cases meticulously designed to verify predetermined functionalities. While these methods are essential for ensuring reliability and stability, they may sometimes miss the unexpected bugs or usability issues that real users might encounter. This is where exploratory testing comes into play, offering a dynamic and flexible approach that taps into the creativity and intuition of testers.
What is Exploratory Testing?
Exploratory testing is an approach to software testing that emphasizes the freedom and creativity of testers to explore the application under test (AUT) in an unscripted and adaptive manner. Unlike scripted testing, where tests are predefined and executed step-by-step, exploratory testing encourages testers to simultaneously design and execute tests, allowing them to adapt their approach based on the feedback and discoveries made during testing.
Pros and Cons of Exploratory Testing
Pros:
Cons:
The Role of Creativity
At its core, exploratory testing relies heavily on the creativity and intuition of testers. Testers are encouraged to think outside the box, leveraging their domain knowledge and experience to uncover potential issues that may not be evident through scripted tests alone. This creative freedom empowers testers to simulate real-world user interactions, enabling them to identify usability issues, edge cases, and unforeseen bugs that might go unnoticed in traditional testing approaches.
When and How to Use Exploratory Testing?
Exploratory Testing is said to be done in the early phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). In the agile development environment where the sprints are short and software builds are released very frequently, exploratory testing plays a vital role in discovering and reporting bugs and getting them resolved within the same sprint cycle. The experience gained by testers from exploratory testing can be valuable in later stages of testing and in designing in-depth test cases. Once the test cases are designed from such investigation and observation, they can further be planned to be automated to get added to the regression suite.
Till now we are aware that exploratory testing is all about exploring. Exploratory testing is not only done to understand the product functionalities but also to understand the customer requirements. For quality bench marking, it is important to navigate the software according to the end user's perspective. Though there is no defined process for exploratory testing, the below depiction will define a structure of exploratory testing commonly adopted by testers.
Key Principles of Exploratory Testing
1. Adaptability:
Exploratory testing is highly adaptable, allowing testers to adjust their testing strategies on the fly based on emerging insights and observations. This flexibility enables testers to focus their efforts on areas of the application that are most likely to yield valuable results.
2. Learning-Oriented:
Exploratory testing is as much about learning as it is about testing. Testers approach each testing session with a curious mindset, seeking to understand the intricacies of the application and uncover potential areas of improvement. Every testing session presents an opportunity to gain new insights and refine testing strategies for future iterations.
3. Risk-Based:
Exploratory testing prioritizes testing efforts based on the perceived risks associated with different areas of the application. Testers focus their attention on high-risk areas first, ensuring that critical functionalities are thoroughly tested before moving on to less critical components. This risk-based approach helps optimize testing efforts and maximize test coverage.
4. Collaboration:
Exploratory testing encourages collaboration among testers, developers, and other stakeholders. By fostering open communication and sharing of insights, teams can leverage collective expertise to identify and address issues more effectively. Collaboration also helps build a shared understanding of the application and its requirements, leading to better-informed testing decisions.
Real-Time Example of Exploratory Testing
What we see is what we believe, right? You might still be wondering what exploratory testing looks like. Well, it looks like wandering out in an app and choosing your path to fly without depending on someone’s direction. That means, there are no pre-designed test cases and testers have some sort of quick description that defines what exactly needs to be tested.
Let’s take an example of a food delivery app and list a few testing modules that strike our mind:
Since the food delivery app would have multiple restaurants and dishes, an exploratory tester needs to test with different test data. The login page and payment gateway are more concerned aspects in terms of security and are important to be tested with multiple test scenarios. However, being creative and analytical is something that exploratory testing requires the most.