What is Exploratory Testing? | Software Testing

In this article, you will learn about exploratory testing and its advantages and disadvantages.

It needs to be performed when the requirements do not exist. So, to perform exploratory testing, we have to explore the application fully in every possible way, understand the flow of the application, prepare the test document, and then test the application. This complete process is known as exploratory testing. 

We will perform exploratory testing for the following reasons:

• When not able to figure out the requirement, 
• Early iteration is a must. 
• The testing team must have an experienced tester in the team.

We have to perform the unit testing, regression testing, and system testing before performing the exploratory testing. It is essential to understand the application at first. To understand the application, we will execute component testing. For example, if the application is having a login page having different elements, then we will understand each part of the application with component testing. But in reality, we are performing the exploratory testing as we are exploring the application. While performing the integration testing, we are indirectly performing the exploratory testing. Even if we are executing the system testing, we are indirectly understanding the application. 

Advantages of Exploratory testing

• If the tester is performing the exploratory testing, the tester can easily get the critical bugs early because it takes less time and less preparation. 
• In the test cases, we can easily catch the bugs which we might miss while performing the test cases. 
• It can be used in testing the new features and the existing features too. 
• Executing the exploratory testing requires a lot of attention from the test engineer to explore the application. 

Disadvantages of Exploratory testing

• Time Consuming: It takes a lot of time because before executing the exploratory testing we have to understand the application completely. Then only the tester can perform the testing and knows which components need to be tested more intensively. 
• It might happen sometimes that the test engineer will understand the features as the bug. It will become problematic to developers in some cases. 
• The above can happen in a vice-versa situation. It means bugs can be considered as features of an application. It can also create a big problem for everyone involved in the application.

So, before performing the exploratory testing we must have all the understanding and knowledge of an application. Even the small parts matter a lot in this testing.