Not All Who Wander Are Lost—Exploratory Testing in Agile/DevOps
As we modernize and automate our tests in DevOps, or even adopt AI, we need to consider what we might be missing. In this presentation, Aaron will discuss the history of exploratory testing, how it gained popularity with agile and DevOps practices, and why we still need it as we move forward with AI-driven testing. We will briefly look at what a healthy test pyramid involves and discuss why we would want to use planned exploratory testing as part of the healthy pyramid. We will cover how exploratory testing is different than ad hoc testing, how to plan it, time box it, and use a charter. For the charter, we will use examples from the industry to get ideas on what good “tours” through the system might look like. After this session, you will have tools to use and be able to go hold an exploratory testing session or “Bug Bash” on your team.
Aaron Nelson has over twenty years of experience working for State Farm on various efforts as a tester and QA Specialist. After starting with support of call monitoring tools, he moved to workstation platform testing. He later worked on an agile project to create an activity management system as his organization was trying out agile methods for the first time. While there, he learned the importance of exploratory testing. Since then, he has worked in research and development, Test Center of Excellence, and he is now part of test practice enablement consulting with teams to mature their tests.