Review By: Danny Vinson
07/19/2010In his book, Dr. Whittaker sets out to describe a useful, evolved approach to the manual component of software evaluation. Others, such as Cem Kaner and James Bach, have laid the groundwork for a larger definition of exploratory testing as a way to bring some kind of structure to an often ill-defined testing approach. With this book, the intention doesn't seem to be to provide any genre-sweeping definition; instead, it’s to give people involved in manual and hybrid testing groups a powerful metaphor to provide more order and durability to the exploratory testing approach.

The heart of this book, aside from the very useful sections on testing from scenarios, is the idea of using different-defined perspectives—the “tours” in this book's subtitle—to apply creative extrapolation to scripted or scenario-based testing. A tour is described as moving through testing with a specific persona in mind, such as how a particular kind of tourist moves through London. How would a guidebook-led tourist move through town? Would he follow the guidebook section by section, never deviating from what's written? Following the scenarios or scripts exactly fits this approach. How, then, would that tourist change behavior if it's a rainy day and the major attractions are closed? Would he stay in the hotel and explore every hallway and back passage? What would a different kind of person, such as a saboteur, do in the same scenario?

Following the sections on how specific tours might behave and how those translate into software testing, Dr. Whittaker provides examples from the first teams to apply the tourism metaphor in production environments, which were written by members of those teams. These are great stories with wonderful insight on the limitations and advantages of this approach and how it worked with their projects. Also included in the appendices are excerpts from two of Dr. Whittaker's Web blogs.

This is an interesting and well-written book likely intended for those comfortable in the testing world. Novices might be a little unfamiliar with some basic aspects of testing presented in this book, but those with more experience can certainly find useful elements throughout. Since it isn't rooted in a specific technology and can be applied to many different kinds of software (or systems for that matter), I think it has the potential to be a useful part of one's testing toolbox for quite a long time. I highly recommend this book to anyone with a little testing experience under their belt. I'll certainly be making use of the tourism metaphor on my next project.