Exploratory Software Testing

Chapter 4. Exploratory Testing in the Large

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”

—Lao Tzu

Exploring Software

The techniques presented in the preceding chapter help software testers make the numerous small decisions on-the-fly while they are running test cases. Those techniques are good for choosing among atomic inputs and arranging atomic inputs in combination or in sequence. This chapter is about the larger decisions testers must make concerning feature interaction, data flows, and choosing paths through the UI that result in making the application do real work. Instead of decisions regarding atomic inputs that serve some immediate purpose on a single input panel, we’ll reason about inputs ...