Learning Through Exploration, A Conversation - Alexandra Schladebeck, Zeb Ford-Reitz & Huib Schoots

Exploratory testing remains misunderstood and underappreciated by many in the testing and development communities. For example:

• Many people know the name but can't say what it means (beyond standard definitions)
• There are relatively few people who choose to make it their speciality
• Requests for test services are usually for manual or automated test case creation/execution- even when the project will not benefit from them.
• Many developers don't understand the value and necessity of it and therefore don't practice and improve.

This is a worrying and also interesting state of affairs. Worrying because exploratory testing is a key part of good quality strategies - and the only way to identify unknown risks. It's interesting because everything we do in software development is exploratory: we work iteratively/incrementally in agile because we gain new insights while working. It's remarkable that we don't already have a catalogue of exploratory activities within software development, and talk more about how to improve our exploration in general.

In this interview hosted by Huib Schoots, Zeb (a developer) and Alex (a tester) will seek to change this. We will look at exploration as a human activity that has links to agility and experimenting. We'll talk about exploratory activities in the development process - including requirements gathering, coding and debugging, testing (at various layers) and even monitoring and observing. Through stories and examples, we’ll look at exploring from various angles, and give participants motivation and techniques to improve exploration (testing and other activities) within their teams.