Industrial Strength Exploratory Testing

During the past few years, exploratory testing (ET) has gained popularity as one of the most efficient styles of testing for smaller agile development teams. It has a proven advantage of finding defects faster over larger areas of the software. However, exploratory testing is not a mainstay in large-scale, enterprise product testing. Anutthara Bharadwaj explores some of the myths surrounding ET-lack of planning, misconstruing exploration as ad-hoc testing, lack of metrics, deficiency of actionable data in defect reports, and more. Anu addresses these myths with real data from a case study of the Microsoft Visual Studio ALM team that adopted ET over a two-year product cycle on a team with more than one-hundred engineers with an enterprise product servicing several thousand customers. Anu draws from ET charters they applied on the product, what kind of metrics they kept, and how they integrated ET with their existing test practices.