Explore with Intent – Exploratory Testing Self-Management

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As an active learner, you will get better every day you spend on testing. Exploratory testing treats test design, test execution and learning as parallel, mutually supportive activities, to find things we don’t know we don’t know. Doing things in parallel can be difficult, and testing needs to adjust to the tester’s personal skill level and style. Your skill to self-manage your work and your learning – making learning and reflection a habit – is what differentiates skilled exploratory testing from randomly putting testing activities together.

This session teaches you how to explore with intent that fits your personal style and skill, and how to be courteous towards your team members with your information needs. For self-management skills of exploratory testing, we use a notebook thinking tool that focuses on four types of ideas in parallel to keep track of our exploration: Mission (sandboxing my services), Next charter (goal for a timebox), Details (notes I can act on now or postpone a little) and Other charters (identifying more work).

In addition to sharing stories and notes I’ve created on a notebook while I test, we will practice together the most difficult thing to do in parallel: focus on detail and the big picture of testing.