Paper Presentation - at STeP-IN Forum's Software Testing Conference Hyderabad
(September 03, 2010) .
Anutthara Bharadwaj, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation

 

Exploratory testing has rapidly gained popularity over the past few years as one of the most efficient forms of testing in an agile lifecycle. Exploratory testing has a proven advantage of finding bugs faster, with less wastage in terms of test documentation and covering large areas of the application under test in a shorter time period. Why then, do we still find exploratory testing not being a mainstay in large scale enterprise product testing? This presentation aims to explore some of the myths surrounding exploratory testing in a large scale and seeks to address those with practical data. Some of these myths are around lack of planning, misconstruing exploration to ad-hoc testing, lack of accountable metrics for exploratory testing and deficiency of actionable data in bugs filed through exploratory testing.

System testing has been one of the most challenging areas within the entire test life cycle; and more so because, at the end of the development phase, the entire focus is on testing. System testing has the largest share amongst all types of testing. This is because of challenging issues that testers encounter on a day-to-day basis, such as: