Exploratory Testing As Code

What if testing followed the lead of revolutions in infrastructure and configuration management. What if testers treated exploratory testing like developers do code? Exploratory testing is a powerful and effective technique. However, its acceptance is inhibited because there isn’t a common structured process that enables the traceability and transparency to make it a standard across the software industry. In this session, Brendan Connolly will introduce the tooling and process needed to implement a light-weight, scalable, transparent, and traceable approach to managing exploratory testing modeled after how code is treated. Brendan will make the case that there are meaningful benefits to modeling testing processes after development processes. Comparing the development life-cycle to the testing life-cycle, Brendan will briefly discuss benefits & transparency of version control, true value of peer review, and network effects of common tooling. Sharing insights and lessons learned along the way from implementing this approach across multiple teams, products, and countries, Brendan will also cover transitioning existing testing efforts to an “as code” approach, best practices for capturing and structuring testing notes for source control, repository organization and branching strategy, use cases for peer review, and benefits of existing development ecosystem and async collaboration.