Brandon Holloway is a Quality Assurance Engineer at ThreeWill. He has over 10 years of QA experience in requirements gathering, risk analysis, project planning, project sizing, scheduling, testing, defect/bug tracking, management, and reporting.
Introduction: Exploratory Testing in Agile
I’m a Quality Assurance Engineer here at ThreeWill. It’s important in my job to make sure I am testing at the highest level possible. In this article, I make the case for utilizing exploratory testing in Agile. You’ll see why I like this method and why it’s effective for testing.
Less Prep
Exploratory testing doesn’t need to wait for detailed planning or test cases. Its effectiveness relies heavily on just hitting the ground running. Simply open the program and start taking logical paths that the user would take. Intentionally make mistakes that you feel the user would most likely make. This really boosts the tester’s utilization and can save a ton of time.
Its effectiveness relies heavily on just hitting the ground running.
Find Common and Critical Bugs Quickly
Since you’re typically putting yourself in the end user’s shoes when you begin your testing, you will most likely come across the most common failures (which are often the most critical) right off the bat. Exploratory testing in Agile enables you to report these bugs immediately and allows developers more time to put in a fix.
Avoid Tunnel Vision
When you write out test cases, it’s easy to get bogged down in detail. You can become so focused on each and every step that you sometimes forget the more high-level aspect of “does this all make sense?”. End users aren’t going to have tunnel vision when they first start to use new software. They may very well be all over the place. Exploratory testing doesn’t set boundaries and allows you to move freely with a more feel-based approach.
Conclusion
I hope this article helps make a case for the uses of exploratory testing in Agile software development. Let me know in the comments any methods that you like to use in your testing.
Check out some of my articles on related topics:
- 3 Things to Consider When Testing Out of The Box SharePoint Features
- Quality Assurance Levels – Which One is Right for Your Project?
- Do Software Testers Need to Know How to Code?
