This post was written by Noy Bar from the Customer Success team. In the
first part of this three-part weekly series on exploratory testing in an
Agile environment, we discussed what exploratory testing is, where it
came from, and its characteristics.
When to use exploratory testing
James Bach, in his paper Exploratory Testing Explained, advised that exploratory testing and freestyle exploratory testing should be considered in the following situations:
When rapid feedback is required on a system, area of functionality, a feature, or an area which might be riskyWhen there’s a need to quickly get up to speed on new softwareWhen you want to move beyond the scripts that have already been used for testingWhen looking for the most significant bug in the shortest time possibleWhen scenario-based tests have already been executed but another opinion on the quality of the software is soughtWhen there’s a need to check out a specific bugWhen there’s a need to determine if scripted tests are required in a specific area, by investigating risk in that areaWhen the end-user’s perspective is neededBach adds some other situations which are more relevant to exploratory testing (as opposed to freestyle exploratory testing):
When improvising on scripted testsWhen understanding unclear test stepsDuring product analysis and test planningWhen improving existing testsWhen writing new test scriptsDuring regression testing of old bugsWhen checking the user manual