Art and testing may look like an odd couple. True, Glenford Myers combined both in his book “The Art of Software Testing”, but the art in there was strictly limited to the title page, since the term isn’t even mentioned once throughout the whole book. It referred to skill and mastery, of course, not to an aesthetic experience.

Exploratory testing is a software testing technique that combines simultaneous learning, test design and test execution. Shmuel Gershon has proposed two dices that allows to bring a little bit of fun to any exploratory testing session. One dice includes the six Product Elements from James Bach and the other twelve Quality Characteristics from The Test Eye team. Each combination of these two dices provides a new angle for testing an application. For those who are allergic to origami and don’t want to build their own dices, an online version exists …

As a software testing consultant and musician, I meet a lot of skilled testers who do amazing work. Through experience and a lot of trial and error, they have developed skills they can’t easily explain. Unfortunately, with software testing, there aren’t as many obvious avenues for skill development as there are for musicians. Many software testers don’t realize that there are learnable exploratory testing skills they can develop to help them become even more valuable to software development teams.

In this blog post James Bach explains the paired exploratory survey technique for software testing. A paired exploratory survey is a process where two testers confront one product at the same time for the purpose of learning a product, preparing for formal testing and/or characterizing its quality as rapidly as possible

In this blog posts, Lanette Creamer discusses the basic parts of all software testing activities, being exploratory testing or requirements testing.

In his blog post ‘”Exploratory Testing” is a pleonasm ‘, Aaron Hodder explains that there is no “exploratory testing” and “other testing”. All testing is exploratory. If it’s not exploratory, it’s not testing.

This post about exploratory testing and review discusses the misapprehension that the advocates of exploratory testing suggest that review or other forms of testing should be dropped.

Adam Shostack discusses he state of Software Quality with James Whittaker. Learn about the current transition from testing infrastructure to testing business logic.