Explore It!

Characterizing Bugs

Sometimes you explore to find problems. Other times you explore because you already know there’s a problem and you need to characterize it in more depth. The techniques in this book work for both situations.

Consider, for example, the case of a web service that seemed to get slower and slower the longer the server had been up. Various team members noted that if the server slowed to a crawl, restarting the server process made the performance problems go away. So one of the programmers on the team designed a series of experiments. He did not think of it as exploratory testing, but that’s exactly what he was doing.

The programmer even had a charter, although he would not have called it that:

The programmer wrote a little ...