Innovations in Exploratory Testing

I always wanted to write on this topic because-

• Most Testers are too intimidated by their jobs to explore the possible innovations in Testing.
• Most Testers are looking to jump into Automation.
• Most Testers aren’t thinking deep (or not thinking at all).
• Most Testers aren’t actively learning new skills.

The Problem Statement at large

Testing is ‘plagued’ by two kinds of problem-

• Depth of Testing A lot of people test, but no one knows to think or describe the depth of their testing. Everyone thinks they are testing deep (apparently not deep enough).
• Articulation A lot of people fail in the articulation of the value of their testing. Thereby, the story is missed and we end up with pass and fail metrics.

The Challenges

• Most testers appear’ to be technically-challenged.
• Hence, they don’t think about building tools to solve their own problem.
• However, they know the problems that are on ground, that are ‘plaguing’ them.
• Most geeks building testing products build it so that geeks can use not for testers.
• Most tools built, end up as automation tools.

Possible Innovations

• Think of tools that help the testers in guiding what areas they have missed (possible A.I. solution).
• Think of tools that help testers build a heat-map of which areas they have hit the most and which areas they haven’t hit at all.
• Think of tools that help the stakeholders understand the coverage beyond Pass and Fail.
• Think of tools that highlight areas where bugs were reported in the previous builds.
• Think of testability enabler tools to help testers to test areas they have not been able to touch.
• Think of tools that would list functions not exercised well enough.

Our Little Attempts

• Bugasura App and Chrome Extension– We built Bugasura keeping the Tester in mind.
• Bugasura takes care of screenshot capture, screenshot annotation, crash log capture, test flow reporting and adding Jira Integration.
• Today testers spend a lot of time – downloading the screenshot and logs and then compiling it to a report in Jira. Plenty of time wasted. It is free to use.

I want to meet testers like me who are innovating and if you are one of them – please get in touch with me. People like us are rare species and most want to go and do something on Selenium or Appium because that helps them get their next job.

Tools like Bugasura & Postman came to life because someone saw problem statements in the space of Functional Testing & dug deep enough to find solutions.

I have failed at least 5 times building tools before Bugasura and AppAchhi Bot started showing some good promise. I can help if you are building tools in sharing my lessons learned and help prevent a failure for you. As an ecosystem we have to succeed.