Quality & Testing · master area

Exploratory Testing

Using the feature as the named person would, with a curious eye for the unnamed. What happens at the edges nobody scripted? What surprises emerge from real combinations of inputs the test plan didn't imagine?

Owners: QA, Designer Phase it lives in: How We Build (Volume IV) The corpus principle this enacts: Witnessed, not described.

Where it lives in the chain

• How We Build · Testing · QA craft — the canon

How to do this

Exploratory testing is not unscripted. It is time-boxed and themed:

• Time-box — 60 to 90 minutes. Less and the tester rushes; more and fatigue produces silence.
• Theme — "the new grader experience," "financial display under negative balances," "language switching mid-session." The brief points at the theme.
• Charter — "I will explore how the feature behaves when the user changes their device mid-task, looking for state loss and visual breakage." Three sentences.

During the session:

• Take notes in real time — time-stamped. "09:42 — switched from desktop to mobile mid-grading. The exam list re-rendered and lost the selected exam. No warning."
• Vary inputs deliberately — empty, oversized, multilingual, edge dates.
• Pursue surprises — if something is unexpected, follow it. The script will not.

What good output looks like

A QA report after exploratory testing includes:

• What was explored — the charter, the actual paths taken.
• What was found — bugs, with the wallet/JWT-style six-dimension classification.
• What was not explored — "I did not test concurrent submissions from two tabs." That is a gap for the next session.
• What surprised — moments that weren't bugs but felt off. "The success animation lasted 3 seconds; it interrupted the flow." Feed these into the next brief.

The wallet bug was caught in staging exploratory testing, before it shipped. That is exploratory's value. A team that tests only the scripted scenarios ships the bugs the script didn't imagine — and those bugs trace to scenario-gap, which the amigos session was supposed to prevent but couldn't, because nobody imagined the boundary case.

Related crafts

• Pre-Merge QA Verification — where exploratory often happens
• QA Report — the artefact this produces
• UX Review — the designer's parallel exploratory