Two Sides of Testing

It’s been twenty years, but I remember the conversation as though it were yesterday. One of my coworkers, Marchell, pointed at an inch-thick stack of paper on her desk: test cases covering just a small fraction of the capabilities in the software package we were testing.

“It is so frustrating,” she sighed. “No matter how many tests we write, no matter how many cases we execute, we always find the most serious bugs when we go off the script.”

At the time, I didn’t know the term exploratory testing, even though Cem Kaner had already coined it in his 1988 book, Testing Computer Software [Kan88]. I just knew that Marchell was right. No matter how many test cases we added to our test suite, we still found surprises when we ...

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