Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing

I wanted to know how to understand the code I have to work with. This book presents a lot of great advises how to start. Maybe it is mainly for testers, but as a developer which has to work with legacy code it is also valuable.

Another great book from Pragmatic Programmers that is worth reading whether you are in management, software development, analysis or testing. The thoughts are well laid out, the author is personable, the chapters are organized well, and lots of real world examples are provided from specific projects.In my years of working in software development I have noticed to paths testers take. Chaotic, where they initially try to break the system with the most extreme choices they can, and spec testers that work closely to specific test cases. If a person applies the principles in this book to software testing it will lead to respectable feedback to the developers for addressing deficiencies (whether those are bugs or expected functionality that is lacking). The benefits of both the harsh and spec based testing will be made manifests in exploratory testing.The chapter on chartering is excellent, because it not only proposes a good practice for software testing but for addressing a multitude of problems. It is as follows: Explore ___ with ___ to discover ____. Outside of testing software consider its application to acquiring virtues, trying out new team practices, or making any type of major "trial" to see if a process is in somehow improved.The Test Heuristics cheat sheet is excellent for beginners, and is worth going over with your newer software testers so that they are providing value above that of just a standard user testing the software.I would recommend this book and encourage members of my team to read it.

Elisabeth crushes the myth that exploratory testing is just clicking around and hoping for bugs. She shows that there is skill required to be a good exploratory testing and how you can learn and practice this skill. If you are familiar with exploratory testing, you will be inspired. If you are new to the topic, you will learn about it.The book is easy to read and each chapters is meaningful on it's own.In my opinion it is a must read for anyone who works with software development no matter if you are a tester, programmer, scrum master, manager, etc...

The concept of exploratory testing has been around a long time. All testers have heard about it, and I think most experienced testers do it, without realizing it. Trying to explain what they are doing however is an obtuse task, and that tends to give a cowboy, or renegade reputation to this approach. This book does a great job of explaning the concept of this testing approach and, it also explains how this is actually a process which is plan-able, executable and report-able. Highly recommend this read for beginners and experts alike.

Not only is the topic vital for every software maker to understand, but Elisabeth’s writing is powerful. It’s clear, honest, and authentically genuine—not words I normally think of when I think “technical book.”

This book offers a fast track into exploratory testing with easy to understand methods, enough room to start exploring right away and enough input to get other people convinced.

I've known and followed Elisabeth since 2004. She's an amazing thought leader not just in testing, but in software delivery. This book is a must-have for teams (NOT JUST TESTERS!) trying to improve the value they're delivering to their customers. It's clear, it's concise, it's extraordinarily well-written, and extremely useful in day-to-day shipping of software.

This book is excellent.Short and to the point. No fluff, just useful methods of exploratory testing. Other testing books require you not only to change your testing habits, but also how others work. This is not always realistic.This book is about helping the reader become better at testing. It's a personal adventure.

My first intro to ET, it cleared up many things I was unsure about, and used techniques which I already knew in a context that made sense. In all the first 5 chapters of any book are the real goldmine, and one chapter a day means you get a week of high value up front here.The last few chapters will be most useful to anyone who is new to testing and struggled to frame the patterns and techniques in the book into their current day job. Trust me, everything you hear other people in completely different industries doing in their unrelated testing fields is in fact relevant to you, you just need to grasp the context, something this book does take the time to do. A lean tome, but easy to digest.

I was hoping to learn something new but learned that what the author insists on calling Exploratory Testing is mainly exploring the requirements. A lot of the examples are exactly the kind of thing that should be picked up by unit testing or functional testing or what the author calls "checking". Almost all of it is about discovering what happens when the specification hasn't been defined. The inference that the tester should raise bug tickets when software exhibits behaviour that isn't defined in the requirements is quite poor.It also only gets into how important it is to collaborate with developers and other stakeholders very late in the book. Things like "exploring what happens if a config file is unavailable" could be discovered most easily by speaking to the developer instead of setting up an elaborate test and if the tester hasn't got access to developers then that needs resolving.Having said that, it does offer good advise and insight into identifying what may be missing or ambiguous in the requirements and to a large degree it is only possible to discover a lot of those things after creating working versions of the software.

This book, though short, contains a thorough treatment of exploratory testing. You might worry that a book about testing will make dull reading, but Elisabeth's prose is engaging and easy-to-read. Chapter after chapter of good advice and useful insights will be valuable to testers new and old.My only worry is that once reading this book, testers at typical employers will become disenchanted. Most organisations have such a poor attitude to testing that they are still manually running the regression tests that should have been automated (quadrant 2 in the Agile Testing Quadrants), and consequently never have time for scheduled exploratory testing. Maybe this book can contribute to turning those organisations around. I hope so.

just list of stuff and ideas for testing, you can find many articles in google instead of the book

This book has been so helpful in advancing my exploratory testing techniques.