Intrgrating Exploratory Techniques into a Disciplined Test Process (Elective)

This course covers the Elective area of the Certified Test Manager (CTM) certification, Certified Software Test Professional certification and the CSTAS certification.

For costs and cities where this course might be offered, please see the right border of this page or to bring this course to your test team at your location, contact our Education and Professionals Services Group.

Concepts

Traditional approaches to testing are organized around the distinct phases of test planning, test design, and test execution performed as sequential activities.  Exploratory testing is the interleaving of test planning, test design and test execution in real time with a focus on taking learning into account. In exploratory testing the results of one test case often influence the design of the next test case.

Exploratory testing is designed to minimize overhead spent on detailed test planning and design so as to maximize the time that responsible, intelligent, well trained, and engaged test professionals spend actually testing a system. A major claimed benefit of exploratory testing is that it can be orders of magnitude more productive at finding issues than scripted testing. It has also been touted as being better at finding the most important issues quickly.

This course is based on the philosophy that exploratory testing is NOT ad hoc. A set of exploratory tests can be planned and designed. Coverage data can be reported. It is the hypothesis of this course that projects will be best served by an appropriate blend of scripted and exploratory testing, as well as by having the right mix of manual and automated testing.

Participants will learn:

Students will:

• Know when and how to use exploratory testing
• Be able to plan an exploratory test strategy
• Be able to document exploratory test coverage
• Be able to use the “tour” metaphor
• Be able to use simple tools to support exploratory programming
• Be more effective in finding the most important bugs
• Be able to plan a test execution strategy that includes an optimal mix of testing techniques including scripted, exploratory, manual and automated techniques.

Outline

• Unit 1 – Test Execution Strategies
  • Manual
  • Automated
  • Scripted
  • Ad hoc
  • Exploratory
• Unit 2 – Exploratory Philosophies
  • Cem Kener
  • James Back
  • James Whittaker
  • Synthesis
• Unit 4 – Designing Exploratory Tests
  • Design by Scenario
  • Design by “Tour”
• Unit 5 – Executing exploratory tests
  • Support tools
  • Documentation
  • Pragmatics
• Unit 6 – Summary and Conclusions