Exploratory Testing and its benefits

I'm not going to talk about what exploratory testing is, because there are a lot of websites that talk about it, I'm going to talk about the benefits and for me, the best weapon of a QA in terms of test execution.

Exploratory testing helps a lot to know the system (more than the test cases or feature files) because you are on the actual system using it, testing it and doing stuff on it, you can know what the system does and doesn't do and how it behaves. Exploratory testing is the weapon of choice of the QA more than any other testing type, I must say without fear, that if a user story has a good and defined acceptance criteria you can test your system using exploratory testing in a great way without test cases, feature files or excess of documentation and you can deliver a system with good quality.

There are a lot of techniques to apply exploratory testing, most of them are learned with experience, for example:

• Submit a form with empty fields or spaces
• Submit a form with incorrect data
• Click multiple times on a button
• Search functionality should not work with empty queries
• Upload an image with more weight that the system requirements

These are just basic examples, but, you can't ask a junior QA or tester to apply them, however, while you test and test more stuff, more exploratory cases or scenarios arise. There's a concept which I don't agree about exploratory testing that says minimum planning and maximum test execution, as I said in my first post (https://qa-agile.blogspot.com.co/2017/09/qa-vs-tester.html) 

QA should be involved on both, not one more than other, exploratory testing is part of test execution, planning and management is different and all of them should have the QA's attention.

In my current and my previous jobs, I have used a lot of exploratory testing more than any other test and I encourage all QAs to do it, it has helped me a lot to find a lot of bugs, bugs that you wouldn't find using test cases or acceptance criteria as your primary documentation, don't forget that acceptance criteria, test cases or feature files is where your testing starts not where it ends. Keeping that in mind, usability, UX, and accessibility stuff comes along, you can find a lot of bugs or improvements on functionality that is not really user friendly or requirements that don't make sense, I expect that from a good QA. 

You can and should use test cases or acceptance criteria to execute your tests, but always force yourself to do some exploratory testing on each module and every once in a while on all the system, sometimes as the project advances some modules may be damaged due to new code.

Hope you like my vision of exploratory testing, next Tuesday I'll be talking about accessibility testing!

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter @LuchoAgileQA.