Explore It! – How this book opened my mind to exploratory testing.
When we’re learning about Software Testing, we want to be better testers. We’re starting to improve our skills, explore more and more testing techniques.
I wanted to improve my exploratory testing to test the web applications more effectively.
One time I started to look for some books about it. I wrote in google: exploratory testing books and I’ve seen in the results mainly one book.
“Explore It! Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing” written by Elisabeth Hendrickson. These times I thought: Yes! I’ve found that one book, which I will read as first. I visited amazon and bought the book.
When this book arrived I’ve started to read it.
This book wasn’t huge but was definitely content valuable.
If you’re reading this book, you’ll never be asleep. This book won’t let you feel it. Moreover, during the reading, you’ll always be excited, because every chapter is waiting for something new. Thanks to it you can discover a lot of heuristics, thanks to them you’ll better explore the tested software.
The book is divided into three parts:
The first is about Establishing Foundations, which introduces you to the core building blocks for becoming skilled at exploring. You can learn how to create charters to guide the exploration. When I’ve read this part I started to use the heuristics which I’ve learned from this part to create my charters, and I’m doing this until now.
The second part is about Adding Dimensions where you can find the information about varying interactions, sequences, data, timing, and configurations. You can read here i.a. about Exploring Entities and their relationships, how to recognize and map them.
The last part, Putting It in the context gives us the possibility to put the knowledge from parts one and two into the context of a software project. When you’re reading this part, you can gain a lot of knowledge about how to share your findings, as well as how to integrate exploration into the development cycle from the very beginning.
At the end of every chapter, we have practice sessions. During them, we can practice the gained knowledge in the practice.
The book is not that young, because is published in 2015 but I’m sure the knowledge you can get during the reading is good to use even now.
I think, it’s a really good book about exploratory testing and if you’re interested in this topic, I can really recommend it to everyone 🙂
This post wasn’t so long but I hope that you enjoyed the reading 😀
The next post will arrive soon 😁
