10 years since my first MoT workshop. And my 2nd time in this venue as a workshop room. Then - March 2015. Gamification of Software Testing workshop at TestBash ‘s first workshop day. Room of 50...

Eighteen months, 19 modules, and 59 amazing contributors later, the MoT Software Testing Essentials Certification is complete! Looking back, my favourite part has been seeing so many community m...

What's a bug report?Firstly, a bug, commonly called a defect or problem, is anything that is perceived to threaten the value of the software. A bug report, is the information about the bugs that we find that we collate and supply to the product owner, stakeholders, or developers. Some means of documenting and communicating our defects within the application that we're testing or the software.  Can you give some examples of things that you'll find in bug reports?As part of bug reports, we will have, usually, a a summary of what the bug is, a detailed description with some environment information, attachments of screenshots or videos of the bug, and log files possibly too. And you would also have a priority and severity for the bug. What's the value of a bug report?Logging a bug allows us to track the progress of that bug. It also may be some time before the bug is addressed depending on its severity and priority. So logging the bug means that we won't forget about it. And it's a good starting point for developers to be able to fix an issue. What are the pitfalls?Counting bug reports as a means to determine quality can be misleading. Quality is subjective, and one person's bug is another person's feature. And also just focusing on writing a bug report can have adverse effects on having the collaborative and meaningful conversations about the bug by developers and stakeholders as well. And also badly written bug reports can also damage your reputation as a tester.

What is exploratory testing? (ET) Exploratory testing is an approach towards testing. It involves concurrently learning, designing, and executing, and recording tests, at the same time rather than specifying all your tests upfront before execution, and it has the purpose of uncovering information related to risks. Do you have any examples? I could do things like explore different types of data that could be submitted via a web form or explore the rendering of a web page across multiple browsers or explore how a feature works depending on different user privileges. What's the value of utilizing an exploratory testing approach? Exploratory testing empowers, testers to use their skills to discover information freely. ET can be structured to help keep the tester focused on specific risks, and it can help, a tester to reveal more information that a scripted test approach wouldn't uncover as you're not biased by the test case steps. Are there any pitfalls? Exploratory testing is an approach that requires a lot of skill and practice. A good exploratory tester needs to know how to focus and defocus when testing, And note taking is important to help communicate what a tester has done whilst not hampering them, but this is hard to do.