Shaham Yusuf, Deloitte & Venkat Moncompu, West Monroe Partners
In an industry where prescriptive practice focused on requirements-based testing is prevalent, much attention is paid to scripted test development and verification for conformance. Some people take extra effort to provide visibility of test coverage to leadership that is sufficiently satisfactory yet products/applications continue to fall short of meeting the ‘fitness of use’ criteria of Quality. One reason is the dysfunctional relationship between a design that is system-centric and a solution that ought to be user-centric, which leads to user acceptance issues during software development or defect leakage to production.
Exploratory testing relying on continuous learning, test adaptation and execution, is an effective complementary testing approach which addresses above mentioned gap and helps to detect business critical defects quickly in the testing cycle. However, traditionalists revile at the suggestion of using exploratory testing citing reasons of coverage, test design, traceability, accountability etc. The curious gen Y testers are faced with the daunting task of winning over the skeptics to adopt the practice.
In this presentation we are sharing key factors that have helped us succeed in our efforts to convince stakeholders and to adopt exploratory testing in large scale independent testing engagements. We intend to showcase our blended approach (in other words, Alternative Test Design Techniques) where test designing was done on high level leveraging Scenarios, Mind Maps, Checklist, and Cheat Sheets. Also, the defect metrics presented would intrigue you to give exploratory testing another chance!
Shaham Yusuf & Venkat Moncompu, 2012 Technical Paper, Abstract, Paper, Slides, Notes
