Exploratory Testing

What is Exploratory testing ? how to do exploratory testing ? where can i learn exploratory testing ? How usefull is Exploratory testing ? I do procedural testing and i dont do Exploratory testing.

Well these could be some of the questions anybody would ask when they hear about exploratory testing.These questions also went throught my mind when i heard of the term Exploratory testing.After sometime, googling for exploratory testing,i got some explanations from the book, and some that really explained what it meant and how people explained how they were doing exploratory testing.Belive me everybody does little or more of Exploratory tetsing (knowing or unknowingly). I would not like to give some text book defination for that, as that would not help in understanding exploratory testing.

When refered to Exploratory testing, many consider it similar to adhoc testing.Clicking randomly,given random inputs and to see, how the system behaves.That is not, or rather i would not consider that to be Exporatory testing.This type of testing can be done, when your requirements are not clear,when you have very less knowledge about the system that you have been given to test, and last but not the least less time to test.No time to write Test Cases, test plans, learn about the system under test. While doing exploratory testing, we learn about the system under test, build test plans, and test.

For now i can only say that i am slowly getting more of interest to learn more about Exploratory testing (although i have been doing the same all these years, not calling it exploratory testing).I am looking into some articles, white papers and other things that can give me a good insight of Exploratory testing.Below are some of the link to learn more about Exploratory testing.

Satisfice.com, Testingcraft,
I will continue to update this post or the things that i learn about exploratory testing and appeoach i take into that.

technorati tags:Exploratory Testing, Software Testing

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Post II - Testing Manual or Automate ?

I am continuing this post with my previuos one regading the Testing process,and the methodology to be used.
I am just trying here to put in my thoughts and the process i think will work the best with the type of development process i work with.When the requirements are not complete and the documnetation is really not sufficient to generate Test cases, how do you do you define what are the tests to be done.Untill the product to be tested is given to you, you do not have sufficient understanding of what you are going to test.You understand it by exploring the product and spend some time understanding it.Writing test cases is sometimes considered as the part of the deliverables, which can be UAT.When the time available for you is very less to test and give out the results,how much of time can you spend on the writing test cases,then execute them and then give out the results.it is a very difficult situation to handle.
I follow exploratory testing (not completely) to learn the product under test and in the process find few bugs.when i learn about the product, i then create a very comprehensive Test plan (not a regular test plan), which will give me an overview in the later stage as to what is to be tested and the sections that needs to be covered.I would consider that after the bugs are raised.The issues raised becomes the test cases for the next iteration of testing (usually termed as Regression).If we can try and automate only the these we can reduce the time for testing in the next stage.Any changes made to the product, i have to only change the test plan to accomodate them, so that i do not miss out on any of the parts of the product.then test again mannually or automation for the next release.
Now, what to methodology does this follow,what are pros and cons of that,i am not sure.If we need to give terminology to the stages of the process, yes we can name them --Smoke test,Functional test,Exploratory, Adhoc testing, Regression etc.
A very interesting blog post i found by Ainars Galvans
I am still learing to better the process of testing......

Getting to know about fsf (Free Software Foundation)

In the weekend i had the oppurntunity to attend a talk on Free Software by Richard Stallman,one of the members who established fsf in 1985.The talk was a good one to know about what free software means from the person himself, who started the movement.
The general opinion that people have about free software is that it is just free,and they do want to know in what sense is it free.They just think it free and they can use it for their own benifit and requirement.That is right on one part,however there are also other parts of the GPL (GNU Public License ) or what is said to be the "Free". It is "Free as in Freedom and not as Free as in Free beer".Stallman spoke about why he initiated something like Free software and still conitnues to be against proprietary software.In his words,the software that we use should be redistributable,people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful,the source code should be available for the users who can understand and make changes to the code to work the way they would want it to.He told about how the start was made for building the Operating system now called GNU/Linux or Linux.
For programs to be free software, you the user must have four specific freedoms. There is freedom zero, the freedom to run the program, for whatever purpose in whatever manner. There is freedom one, the freedom to study the source code, to see what the program really does. And then change it to do, what you want. There is freedom two, which is the freedom to distribute copies to others, in other words the freedom to help your neighbor. And there is freedom three, the freedom to help build your community which is the freedom to publish a modified version, so that others can benefit from your contribution. (The lines in this paragraph have been taken from the official Gnu site.)
Well i have a few doubts or rather confusions, coz this is the first time that i attended any free software talks, although my good friend Arky who is a part of the free Software foundation had told me about this long time back.I have to still know more about this and will visit the sites that can give me some information and knowledge about free software and the organization.
The sites that i know at this point of time that give information on FSF:
fsf   GNU   fsf India   Wikipedia

technorati tags:fsf, gnu

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Testing - Mannual or Automate ?

For some time I have been working Testing some desktop and Websites,mostly developed on windows technologies. The devolpment process is not all that streamlined and the testing is also adhock.The development is mostly client or requirement driven and it keeps changing time to time. The problem is how do you give a name to this type of develpment. This type of developement is necessary to cater to clients who do not have the requirements very much clear to put that on papper. After intial discussion is done, a working model is shown and the changes are then taken from the client and the development is carried on.

The main problem now is in this ever changing requirement and short devlivery period,being a person in the testing to decide, what is the type of testing that we will need to follow.Do we perform manual or automated testing.Do we define the Test Plan,write the test cases and execute them, or perform adhock testing.Do we take really much time to retest after every release to cover the testing end to end or only test the fixed or newly included modules to save time. Do we invest on some costly automation tools or select some free tools. Do we keep changing the test scripts for every release and spend some time for it or use the same time in performing some more testing.How effective would each be.How will we evaluate and decide which is the better way of doing things.

These have been in my mind for long and i have done some searching on the internet for finding any approaches to answer my questions.I can post the links and articles that i have collected in the comming posts.My search for a developing a strategy for testing in my organization is still on.....

technorati tags:Testing_Manual, Testing_Automation

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GUI Testing on .Net Platform

I have been searching for some GUI Testing Tool,using which i could automate the Testing process, or rather automate the tests that needs to be repeated number of time.There are quite ad few proprietry tools available in the market for the same like WinRunner,QTP,Test Complete etc..The Application that i wanted to test was built on the .Net platform and so that tool also had to support testing with .Net.What i could see was only the tools like QTP (with a Plugin for .Net) or Test Complete supported testing .Net application. I did not want to use any of these tools (cost was one of the factors for that apart from learning to use the new tool) and i was searching for some free tools that could help me out with automating my tests.I found that NUnit or CSUnit could support testing in .Net platform in performing the unit tests.

I am not used to doing programing and i do not know any programing languages.These tools available support some scripting language of there own and also support some regular scripting like java script or vb script.Recently i found a GUI Automation tool named Ranorex.This is windows GUI automation Library for C++, Python and for the .Net languages. This does not have scripting language unlike other testing tools.The core of Ranorex is build in c++.We can have Python or C# scirpts written for automation.This has a core and wrapper around the core for python, c++ and C#. If you want to use Ranorex from a Python script you need to have Python installed which can be downloaded free from www.python.org. Ranorex is Freeware.

I have downloaded it and trying to use it. I guess now i will need to learn to do some programing and i will choose Python for that, as it is free and after searching on the web found some comments that it is a easy language for learing and powerfull to use.

I will post some more about using Ranorex and Python as i learn along.

technorati tags:Python, .net_testing, GUI_testing, Ranorex

Testing the Blog using the Flock Browser

I was just searching stuff on the web as usual for some extensions for FireFox, and i found this browser.I remeber my friend Arky had mentioned about this browser some time back.Now comming back to the browser,i have not explored it too much.The Inteface looks cool and light.the best thing i like about it is the blogging and the photosharing.I have not tried the photo sharing.Will do that sometime.This is the first post using the blogging feature of Flock.You can get that here.The features are more or less like FireFox.Another cool thing in Flock is that it has a notification to other serviecs like Technorati and you can add the service that you like.

technorati tags:fsf, gnu

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