Guy kolbis

James Whittaker say that testing is Hard and I quote:

“Software testing is complicated by an overload of variation possibilities from inputs and code paths to state, stored data and the operational environment. Indeed, whether one chooses to address this variation in advance of any testing by writing test plans or by an exploratory approach that allows planning and testing to be interleaved, it is an impossible task. No matter how you ultimately do testing, it’s simply too complex to do it completely."

James suggests a new approach for testing called Exploratory Testing. According to James, Exploratory Testing is:

"...exploratory techniques have the key advantage that they encourage a tester to plan as they test and to use information gathered during testing to affect the actual way testing is performed."

This can prove to have some key advantages over plan-first methods. James gives a good explanation:

"...imagine trying to predict the winner of the Super Bowl or Premier League before the season begins … this is difficult to do before you see how the teams are playing, how they are handling the competition and whether key players can avoid injury. The information that comes in as the season unfolds holds the key to predicting the outcome with any amount of accuracy. The same is true of software testing and exploratory testing embraces this by attempting to plan, test and re-plan in small ongoing increments guided by full knowledge of all past and current information about how the software is performing and the clues it yields in the testing results."

I am looking forward to see how to practice that.

What do you think?