Community Stories: Exploratory Testing Simplified With The Xray Exploratory App

It’s been several months since Xray introduced the newest product addition to the Xray family, the Xray Exploratory App. Since then, we’ve received valuable feedback from the community about what you can do with the app. We want to share it with you so you too can take advantage of these insights. 

If you’re new to exploratory testing, we’ll begin with a brief overview of this method of testing. If you want to go further in depth about this topic, take a look at some other Xray posts: Intro to Exploratory Testing or Upgrade your Test Strategy with the Xray Exploratory App. The Dojo at Ministry of Testing has some great articles on the subject too, like Exploring Exploratory Testing and Exploratory Testing With The Team, A Journey Worth Taking. 

What Is Exploratory Testing And Why Should I Care? 

Exploratory testing is not a new approach in the testing world, but it’s often overlooked and underestimated. Exploratory testing doesn’t follow a set of steps with predefined results like automation and scripted manual testing do. Instead, it’s a method for exploring a part of the system using the skills and expertise of testers in order to find defects and provide feedback. 

Exploratory testing always has an explicitly defined objective and is timed. To be successful in this method, you should take notes and track the evidence of your findings. Of course, you’ll find that it’s useful to have a tool that tracks and collects your evidence. 

That’s how the Xray Exploratory App came to be: to ease the process of documentation so that you can focus on your testing session, and then you can easily share your insights with your team to make the necessary bug fixes. 

The Xray Exploratory App (XEA) is a free app that runs on your desktop. If you are using Jira and Xray Test Management, there’s a seamless integration that allows you to track your exploratory testing sessions as test cases and test runs. 

If you’re curious to try it, you can download the app for free and start testing your systems right away. 

Let’s dive into the community feedback. 

Easing The Task Of Exploratory Testing 

“The Xray Exploratory app helped facilitate our exploratory testing and finding bugs in our own system! I think this has the potential to really contribute to our team's testing strategy, especially as we implement more rapid software testing methodologies and principles.” 

Quality Engineering Manager in Healthcare Industry 

Some of the most frequent feedback we’ve received is that it simply makes exploratory testing easier. The Xray Exploratory App allows you to record evidence in several ways, including video and voice recording, text comments, and annotations. When you’re in an exploratory testing session and you come across a defect or bug, you can easily record the evidence by using any of the evidence collection features. But don’t take our word for it:

“Personally, this will help in a way that I will be able to record videos and take screenshots while executing my test cases. Overall, I like the UI, it is usable and would like to use this during testing even if not for exploratory testing. Good job making this project.”  

Software QA Engineer in IT Industry

Once you’ve completed your exploratory testing session, you need to share your findings. That’s where the reporting function comes in handy. 

Reporting And Sharing Your Findings 

“Being able to save the sessions and make a PDF report are really great features.” 

Software Tester in IT Industry

Effective exploratory testing requires you to collect your findings and share them with your team. With Xray Exploratory App, you can easily export your exploratory session, which includes all of the evidence like notes, videos, audio recordings, and annotations that you’ve taken. This can be exported in a PDF report that you can share with your team, or if you are using Xray with Jira, you can save it as an attachment to your test run. 

“(...) the concept and the idea are great, the reporting feature is great - I really enjoy using it and I foresee a great success with this app - keep up the good work! I love the Xray Exploratory App - it is great!” 

Quality Assurance Analyst in Government Organisation

Easy Connections To Jira And Xray Test Management 

“I like how easy it is to import the results into Xray.” 

QA in Environment Services

One of the features that our user community found the most useful is the integration between the app and Xray within Jira. If you’re already using Xray as your test management tool, you can effortlessly incorporate exploratory testing into your test strategy. You can launch the Exploratory App directly from Jira to perform an exploratory testing session, and then you can attach your report directly to your test run. You can also give it a status of PASS or FAIL depending on how successful you thought the session was.

The most important part is that the tool is completely flexible for you to use however you choose. Adapt it to your strategy and play around to see what works best for you. 

Incorporating Community Feedback Into Xray

We want to evolve and improve the product with your feedback. That’s why we’ve asked for continuous insights: so you can lead the way. Since the launch of the app, we’ve had several new releases with features that you requested. 

For example, the ability to record the screen and voice notes at the same time was requested by a community user. 

“Is it possible to do a screen recording and audio at the same time?  This would be very nice to record a video along with speaking what the tester is currently doing.  We test a medical simulator and the tester needs to describe what he/she did with the external instruments in order to produce the behaviour on the video.  It is comparable to a flight simulator where you steer an airplane using a joystick and you want to describe the flight behaviour on the screen by how fast or strong you moved the joystick.  So adding audio to the screen recording would be really nice for us.” 

Head of Software Development at Medical Device Manufacturer

From day one, the Exploratory App has been driven by feedback and use cases from real users. We’re focused on making the app as functional and user friendly as possible so you can focus on the task at hand: exploring your system, finding defects and risks, and letting your team know about your findings. 

Exploratory Testing Has Never Been Easier

Our goal is to provide you with tools that put quality at the centre of your work. With methods like exploratory testing, you can raise the quality of your software and reduce potential risks. We hope you find this feedback useful. 

Now we want to hear from you! Have you tried the Xray Exploratory App yet? Do you use exploratory testing in your test strategy? Leave us a comment below and let us know your thoughts!

Author Bio 

Tonislava Docheva is a marketing specialist at Xray. Currently, she is building content and thought leadership around quality software development. She writes about all things testing and quality on the Xray blog.