Full Stack Testing

Chapter 2. Manual Exploratory Testing

Not all those who wander are lost.

—J.R.R. Tolkien

Manual exploratory testing is an intense activity where you exercise the test application with the objective to explore and understand its behaviors in various situations that are not articulated explicitly anywhere—be it in the requirements document or user stories. As a result of the exploration, often new user flows that were not envisaged during the analysis or development phase and bugs in the existing user flows will be discovered. When such discoveries happen, it is refreshingly joyous for the individual who found them, as it showcases their complex analytical and keen observation skills!

Typically, manual exploratory testing is carried out in a testing environment, where the entire application is deployed. The testers take the liberty to meddle with the various application components, such as the database, services, or background processes, as they please, in order to simulate different real-time scenarios and observe the application’s behavior. This exploratory style of testing differs from traditional manual testing, which refers to the task of manually executing a particular set of actions described as acceptance criteria in user stories or in the requirements document and verifying whether the stated expectations are met successfully. In other words, manual testing doesn’t necessarily exercise any analytical skills, whereas exploratory testing lays a green field in front ...