Why use Exploratory Testing?

Why Do We Need Exploratory Testing?

• At times, it helps in revealing many unknown and un-detected bugs, which is very hard to find out through normal testing.
• As it covers almost all the normal types  of testing, it helps improving our productivity in terms of covering the scenarios in scripted testing and those which are not scripted as well.
• It is a learn and work type of testing activity where a tester can learn more and understand the software if he/she was not able to reveal any potential bug.
• Although disliked by many, helps testers in learning new methods, test strategies, and also think out of the box and attain more and more creativity.

Advantages of Exploratory Testing:

• It can uncover bugs, which are normally ignored (or hard to find) by other testing strategies.
• It helps testers learn new strategies, expand the horizon of their imagination that helps them in understanding and executing more and more test cases, and finally improve their productivity.
• It helps tester in confirming that he/she understands the application and its functionality properly and has no confusion about the working of even a smallest part of it, hence covering the most important part of requirement understanding.
• As in case of this testing, we write and execute the test cases simultaneously. It helps in collecting result-oriented test scripts and shading a load of unnecessary test cases which do not yield a result.
• Exploratory testing covers almost all types of testing, hence tester can be sure of covering various scenarios once the testing is performed at the highest level (i.e. if the exploratory testing performed, it can ensure that all the possible scenarios and test cases are covered). 
  
  
  by Andriy Skop, QA Project Lead