Exploratory testing: Free thinking

At work we’ve been doing numerous paired exploratory testing. I find prioritising hands-on testing important as often my team lead duties like hiring and team support will take over and I’ll become further away from understanding what we’re building, then overall become less effective. I find it a real challenge at times to remain hands on alongside management tasks, however, it can be done. Simple things like joining a paired testing session, solo exploratory, reading bug reports or further docs.

This past week I have been doing paired testing sessions. In one paired exploratory testing session I could have taken some better notes during the session. The complexity was that I was experiencing the product as well as asking questions and note taking. It’s the same with any meeting where you are trying to participate and do the note taking. It’s very difficult to do. Another challenge was that the session was very fast paced with a lot to cover. It worked out well with discovering a broad range of things though. My overall learning was to discuss with the person on how we would do the note taking. Would we pause after each discovered item to give us a chance to note it down? Could we break it up into sections and pause after each section to note take after? Overall an agreement before you start the session to agree on the not taking before we started.

In a second exploratory session my team members had prepared a board where we could note take — Praise, Questions, Suggestions and Problems. It worked very well having that template as a guide. It got me thinking about note taking in general and how I normally approach testing. Personally I do not use templates or do huge amounts of up front prep. I prefer my thoughts to be free flowing and go wherever my thoughts go in the session. Curiosity driving the testing.

What my process might look like:

• Open up a notepad
• Understand what I’m testing (what is the feature for and for who) — I like to get into the mindframe of whoever might be using it.
• Explore the main end to end flow. If I find trouble here, feedback straight away.

Then start exploring some questions like:

• Do I understand this? If not, do I have questions?
• What if I try…?
• Does it make sense?
• What do I think of this?
• Are there any ideas to make this better?
• Is there anything unusual happening?

It makes me realise that I do what you could call free thinking testing. I don’t have a defined list of risks, template or charter. I use curiosity to drive what I do. I sometimes call it “join the dot exercise” where I learn one thing, that goes onto the next and so on. It’s building brick by brick the layers of knowledge and overall understanding.

In terms of note taking I often explore an area of thought, then write down a one line sentence. Then carry on. At the end of the session I would go back and read what I wrote to see if anything needed expanding.

I do sometimes wonder if I’m not using charters, templates or other methods that in one light I could be seen as not doing testing properly. However I feel that testing is all about learning and as individuals we all have our different approaches. This is why when you combine those different individual approaches and perspectives, you discover much more.

I have tried using exploratory charters in the past and I can’t pinpoint exactly why, but it doesn’t work for me! So overall, my final thought is, do what works for you. The main thing is to be curious and learn. That’s where you’ll uncover problems that matter.