This (Google Testing Blog: 8-year-old exploratory testing) is an interesting posting I came across today on exploratory testing... It made me want to write a few words...
First, I noticed that when I Googled "Exploratory Testing" today, the first adsense link was for jobs at Google (i.e. www.google.com/jobs) - which I think is a subtle hint that Google takes this kind of testing seriously ;)
You can also find a decent article on Exploratory Testing by James Bach, which I skimmed through and found quite interesting (www.satisfice.com/articles/et-article.pdf)...
Back to that blog posting (http://www.cs.nyu.edu/%7Emichaels/blog/?p=15) was also a good read... I remember Logo being one of the first programming languages I used (after basic) - it would be so cool to make that turtle move around!
Anyway, I thought it was cool that an eight year old could bring down logo, but I think it's debatable whether this is actually exploratory testing... I don't think he/she actually meant to crash logo, or say "I'm going to put on my Exploratory Testing hat on for a minute".
To me, one of the best things about exploratory testing, is it can be done both at the white box and black box level, and that if you do your homework (structure your code properly, etc), you could write developer tests (the term I prefer for xUnit "unit tests") to make sure you deal with things like bad user input properly.
Another interesting thing that this posting brings up is the fact that even though something may have been around a long time (I played with logo back in the mid 80's) and be relatively stable, it doesn't mean there isn't a chance you might unexpectedly find yourself in an exploratory testing situation.
How much testing should software undergo? Does software undergo enough testing? These are things I'll be pondering... (and I hope you will too)
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