Exploratory Testing Explained

Exploratory testing is about making an effective use of our available resources, skills and practical knowledge and about finding as many high severity defects as possible within a certain time limit. It is based on the tester’s skills, knowledge about testing and system at hand, and known testing methods and tools. Exploratory testing is often integrated in the test strategy together with regular manual testing. As testers, we learn about the system more and more during the project, and additional 'exploratory tests' (or heuristics) should be added continuously to our current manual test cases repository. However, we may find ourselves sometimes with vague requirements, no specification documents, or asked to test very early while there are no mature documents. In these cases and more, Exploratory Testing can be a very effective method or approach that can assist us in deploying a less risky software or system into production.

Testers, testing team leaders and test managers, that would like to know what is Exploratory Testing, how to plan it, run it, measure it, and improve in doing it.