Exploratory Testing

If you would have asked me about exploratory testing a year ago, I probably would have said, "What's that?" I had never heard of it.

It turns out, I've been doing exploratory testing for years. I just never heard it called that. That's one problem with figuring out most of SQA on my own. I never learned some of the lingo.

Exploratory testing is pretty much what the name implies it is. It's manually testing a product without following a formal plan, or deviating from the test plan you were following. Simply put, it's what I've always called "strategically poking it with a stick to see where it bleeds."

Although randomly clicking and typing is a form of exploratory testing, that should be left for the monkeys. If you want to perform good exploratory testing, you need to think more about where that stick should be poking the program. Look at the release notes to see what changed. If you can, read the source code to see the code that changed. If you've done development in the past, ask yourself, "If I were coding this, what would I mess up?"

The more you know about your target, the more likely you'll be poking at weak spots.