Brendan Connolly

Carpe Data

Across the software industry, development has a uniform process: pull a work item, analyze requirements, code, review, merge and release. Testing processes however, vary wildly across teams and this variation of process only increases when considering exploratory testing. Exploratory testing is one of the most powerful and effective techniques available to highlight the value that testers bring to teams, but its adoption, impact and evolution is inhibited because there isn’t a standard widely accepted process to enable the transparency and traceability to make it a non controversial de-facto standard across the software industry. Instead of introducing test specific process and tooling, what if we followed the lead of revolutions in infrastructure and configuration management.

What if we treated our exploratory testing like we do code?

In this eBook I’ll make the case that there are meaningful benefits to modelling testing processes after development processes. Comparing the development life-cycle of to the testing life-cycle.
Then expanding upon a foundation of session based test management, I will introduce the tooling and process needed to implement a lightweight, scalable, transparent, and traceable approach to managing exploratory testing modelled after how code is treated.