"Some birds aren't meant to be caged, their feathers are just too bright"- Morgan Freeman, Shawshank Redemption. This blog is from one such bird who couldn't be caged by organizations who mandate scripted software testing. Pradeep Soundararajan welcomes you to this blog and wishes you a good time here and even otherwise.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

A question on exploratory testing from Quora

How exploratory testing differs with other testing? What is the common problems faced by a tester when performing exploratory testing?

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And my answer:

You can cook pizza by following instructions or trying it out on your own. When you try it out on your own, you learn a lot more than merely following instructions. You don't get pizza a couple of times but once you get it, you would have exhausted many mistakes. The next time you have to cook any food, you will be aware of the kind of mistakes you made with pizza and would then ask a bunch of questions to avoid doing those mistakes. You may ask for the instructions but you won't treat the instructions the same way you would have treated had you not done your own mistakes. You have prepared yourselves to cook any food in this exploratory cooking process. 

However, you get a pizza faster when you follow instructions given to you. The goal is to not produce one pizza but thousands and if you need to keep following the instructions every time, the first pizza is faster but to produce thousands is slower. Accidentally if the instructions are wrong, you perfect the imperfect pizza. The next time someone asks you to cook pasta instead of pizza, you are asking instructions, follow it and pray God that the instruction given to you is perfect. 

There are competitions like Master Chef and what we observe is - the participants need to cook food and there are some standard procedures to follow to cook the same food. However, some people do it more awesome than others. Why? Their experience of doing mistakes with the dish, their skill and passion for doing it better and their skill to make the right decisions at the right time helps them win. 

Be a master chef. If you want to be one. Be one from today because nobody becomes somebody all of a sudden.

http://www.quora.com/How-exploratory-testing-differs-with-other-testing-What-is-the-common-problems-faced-by-a-tester-when-performing-exploratory-testing

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