Exploratory Testing Index

This index is a thematic analysis of my writing around exploratory testing. 952/952 blog posts reviewed. To be reorganized, added to and published as LeanPub book. Last updated: August 29th, 2026.

Courses

• Exploratory Testing Foundations slides with notes. Course taught without slides as fully experiential.

What is Exploratory Testing

• There are Plenty of Ways to Talk about Exploratory Testing
• What is Exploratory Testing?
• What is Exploratory Testing?
• What is Exploratory Testing - Programmer Edition
• Testing Computer Software 2nd ed.
• A Good Week For Exploratory Testing
• Going Meta: Writing an Article about What Is Exploratory Testing
• Refining a 34 year old practice
• Exploratory Testing the Verb and the Noun
• Introducing Exploratory Testing
• There is non-exploratory testing
• Going Beyond Defaults
• Classic Example of Exploratory Testing
• Explaining Exploratory Testing

Contemporary Exploratory Testing - Discovery of a community

• Contemporary Exploratory Testing
• Increasing Understanding of Modern (Exploratory) Testing
• In Search of Contemporary Exploratory Tester
• An hour and a half of intentional contemporary exploratory testing

CI/CD and Exploratory Testing

• Exploring Pipelines
• Making Releases Routine
• Done with Making These Releases Routine

History

• A personal journey to exploratory testing
• Three Stories Leading Into Exploratory Testing
• Memory Lane 2005: ISTQB Foundation Syllabus, Principles of Testing

Three Kinds of State of the Art of Exploratory Testing

• 35 Years of Exploratory Testing
• Camps of testing
• The Conflated Exploratory Testing
• Where in Testing is Exploratory Testing
• Falling into a trap, talking exploratory testing
• There is such a thing as testing that is not exploratory

Self-Management in Exploratory Testing

• How to Explore with Intent - Exploratory Testing Self-Management
• My first job and what has changed since
• Assignments in Intent
• Testing by Intent
• Testing, A Day At a Time
• Optimising start of your exploratory testing
• Everyone can test but their intent is off

The Fine Line of Testing and Fixing, Ownership

• The War of Ownership
• Fill the Gap (fix the bug)
• Re-testing without the tester
• All people are decision makers

Time and Cognition, Being in Control

• Asserts and Approvals and Why That Matters
• Sequences of Time and Cognition
• There's such thing as low quality exploratory testing
• From appreciation of shallow testing towards depth
• Mixed messages - learning to live with it
• Staying with the problems longer
• Exploratory Testing and Explaining Time
• Limiting what's held in my head

Notetaking and Reporting

• Use of Rapid Reporter in Exploratory Testing
• Reporting and Notetaking
• It's Not What Happens at the Keyboard
• Telling What Testers Do in Simple Terms
• Counting test cases
• It Ain't Bragging If It Is True
• Public notetaking, a 12 year sample

Test Documentation

• Three routes to fixing problems test cases hide
• The difference between a test idea and a test case
• An Exploratory Tester's Zephyr
• Language change in Gherkin Experiment
• On Test Cases
• The Documentation Conundrum
• How many test cases do we still have to execute?

Results from testing and collaboration

• Stop Assigning Me Jira Tasks
• The Scout Rule on Tickets
• What did 100 people say about their Tester - Developer Collaboration?
• The Result Gap - Describe the Invisible
• A No Jira Experiment
• A NoJira Health Check
• Resultful Testing
• The Results Gap

Splitting Work Between Different Team Members

• How to Survive in a Fast Paced World Without Being Shallow
• One Eight Fraction of a Tester
• Deep Exploratory Testing
• Deep Testing and Test Levels
• Devs Leading the Testing I Do
• Testing does not improve quality - but a tester often does!
• The tester work asymmetries in team
• We don't test manually at all
• A Team Member with Testing Emphasis
• Test Communication Grumpiness
• Pairing Exploratory and Unit Testing
• Making my work invisible
• Why setting out to automate tests is a bad idea
• Tester Roles and Services
• One Company, Five Testing Archetypes
• Services I provide for my team
• How to Maximize the Need for Testers
• Tale of Two Teams

Opportunity Cost

• Time warp to the Principle of Opportunity Cost
• The Right Time for Testing
• Options that Expire
• When do YOU start testing?
• Cost-Constrained Exploratory Testing
• Purposeful and realistic return on investment calculations

Serendipity

• Finding Bugs Serendipitiously
• Working with all levels of ignorance
• Finding a Bug I wasn't looking for

Managing Exploratory Testing

• Managing Testing based on Threads
• The Line Between Exploratory Testing and Managing It
• Applying Tyranny of Structurelessness to Exploratory Testing
• What Makes Up Session Based Test Management
• Secret sauce to great testing is to change the managers
• Threads, Sessions and Two Kinds of Tasks

Hiring Exploratory Testing

• Reality Check: What is Possible in Tester Recruitment
• What Exploratory Testing is Depends on Who You Are
• Training an Exploratory Tester from Ground Up
• One Eight Fraction of A Tester
• Hiring manual and automation testers
• TDD makes a bad programming test for testers
• Core tasks for test positions
• Dear customer, what you assess me for is extremely ambiguous
• Evolving scoring criteria for To Do App for recruiting
• Remembering job interviews

Automation in Exploratory Testing

• The Automationist's Gambit
• Intersection of Exploratory Testing and Test Automation
• Fighting Against Automation Isn't Doing Anyone a Favor
• Yes, I am a manual tester and ...
• The Myth of Automating without Exploring
• Tools Guide Thinking
• Stop Analyzing, Start Automating
• Tests Surviving Maintenance
• Three Kinds of Testing
• The Test Automation Trap
• All I got for a week of programming was one lousy test script
• We're getting worse at testing (time to learn to explore with automation)
• Automation tests worth maintaining
• Frustrations on system test automation efforts
• In Search of Test Automation Strategy
• Removing Robot Framework From My World
• Robot Framework and the Myth of Embedded Devices
• Four levels of running test automation
• Selenium and Me
• Test Automation with Python, an Ecosystem Perspective
• Why Have You Not Added More Test Automation?
• The Browser Automation Newbie Experience
• Model-Based Testing in Python
• Test Automation - Friend or Foe?
• Why is it bad practice to write your programmatic tests like your manual tests?
• Not an ad but a review: Copado Robotic Testing

AI and Exploratory Testing

• Jokes and Poetry from a Stochastic Parrot
• GitHub Copilot Demos and Testing
• How AI changes Software Testing?
• List Ways in Which AI is Used In Testing
• A Bunnycode Case Study for AI in Testing
• GenAI Pair Testing
• Well, did AI improve writing test plans?
• AI is automation at scale of benefits
• Who Are You Paying to Learn AI with You?
• Habit of AI in Quality Engineering
• Code Reviews Have Already Changed
• Quality adventures vibe coding for light production
• Benchmarking results - Human, Human with AI, AI with Human and where we land
• 4x improvement, 13x improvement
• Why would I even want to generate test cases with AI?
• Stop with the prompting, be clear on your intent
• Lessons Learned from AI for Testers Coaching
• Comparing Blue, Yellow, Red, Pink and Purple - How are they Different

Test Strategies and Approaches

• Finding the work that needs doing in a multi-team testing
• Kaizen on Test Strategies
• Test Planning Workshop has Changed
• World-changing incrementalism
• What's worth repeating?
• End to End Testing as a Test Strategist
• Scaling Testing Bubbles
• How My Team Tests for Now
• More to lifecycle for testing
• Contemporary Regression Testing
• Prepare to shift down

Plans and Planning

• The Power of Three Plans
• Test Plans and Templates
• Planning in Bubbles
• Faking plans is easier than fighting plans

Charters and Plans of All Sorts

• Chartering for Exploratory Testing

Test Environments

• All of us have a test environment
• Testing on THEIR production

Specifications in Exploratory Testing

• It Does What It's Supposed to But Is this This All We Get?
• The Lure of Specifications
• Learning While Testing
• Socializing requirements
• Requirements lead into worse testing?

What To Test and How to Know?

• Say it Out Loud, It Is Testing
• Machine Learning knows it better: I’m a 29-year old man
• Doing Security Testing
• 1-2-3 model to test coverage

Skills and Traits

• Testers Need to Read Code
• Tester Superpowers
• Stop Thinking Like a Tester
• Tester as a Catalyst
• Advice for the New Tester
• Memoirs of Bad Testing
• Anyone can test but...
• How to make testing fun and enjoyable?
• Do testers need to be devops engineers too?
• Learning programming through osmosis
• Multi-Model Assessment Practice for Describing Skills
• The Reimagined Tester and How to Grow One

Exploratory Testing is about Learning

• Learning without Impact on Results
• Never Stop Learning
• Power of Hindsight and Critical Mindset
• The lessons that take time to sink in
• Learning for more impactful testing
• The One Things that Turns Your Testing to Exploratory
• Learning about learning
• Learning the hard way, experience
• Learning, and why agency matters

Lessons from Bugs

• A Pesky Bug That Exploring Would Help With
• Time bombs in products
• Does What It Is Supposed to Do But Is This All We Get?
• The Ways Bugs Cost Us
• Did you make notes of what you learned on the CrowdStrike case?

Features as target in Exploratory Testing

• The Most Overused Test Example - Login

Whole systems as target in Exploratory Testing

• Looping Learning to Exploratory Testing
• Testing a Modify Sprite Toolbar
• The First Test on a New Feature
• From Single Scenario to Feedback in Test Automation
• What Testing We Do Looks Like?
• An Analysis of Exploratory Testing
• Lessons Learned on Working with Data-Intensive Applications
• Salesforce Testing - Components and APIs to Solutions of CRM
• WebUI Testing
• Learning to test in Dynamics365 projects
• Platform Product Testing

APIs as target in Exploratory Testing

• Exploratory Testing an API
• Run the code samples in docs
• Anchoring an idea while Exploratory Testing an API
• Fooled by Microservices, APIs and Common Components

Code as target in Exploratory Testing

• Exploring Gilded Rose
• A Developer's Idea of Exploration
• Gilded Rose for Exploratory Testing

Exploring without a test target

• A Feature Was Born
• The Non-Verbal Feedback
• Folks tell me testing happens after implementation

Heuristics and Constraints

• Never Be Bored
• Seasonal Fluctuation
• Seeing Negative Space
• My #1 thing to Add With Testing
• Thinking in Scopes
• The Model Competition
• Recall Heuristics for Test Design
• The Positive Negative Split Leads Us Astray
• Sample More
• The Five Year Heuristic

Collecting and Presenting Evidence

• Burden of Evidence
• Would You Just Listen for a Change?
• Theories of Error
• Reacting to Numbers
• The Numbers and the Stories

Bug Advocacy

• A day in the life of bug report avoider
• Contemporary Bug Advocacy
• Bug advocacy is to go beyond reporting

Pair (Exploratory) Testing

• Styles of Pair Testing
• The Driver-Navigator in Strong-Style Pairing

Ensemble (Exploratory) Testing

• Ensemble Exploratory Testing and Unshared Model of Test Threads
• Mob Testing - How to Enable Better Habits and Skills.
• Mob Testing: An Introduction and an Experience Report
• Amplified Learning with Mob Testing
• Mob Testing is Different to a Bug Bash
• Mob Programming on a Robot Framework Test
• Your choice, explorer!
• Two little ideas for facilitation of ensembles
• Five Years of Mob Testing, Hello to Ensemble Testing
• Hundreds of Hours Mob Programming Over Five Years - Is It Still Worth It?
• The Six Things Facilitator Can Do To Improve Ensembling Session
• Ensemble Programming and Behaviors for Hands, Brains and Voices
• Why Ensemble Programming/Testing isn't Group Programming/Testing

Teaching Exploratory Testing

• A New Experiential Exploratory Testing Exercise on focusing feedback to own application
• Scale: Teaching Exploratory Testing
• How Would You Test a Text Field?
• How Would You Test a Text Field ed2
• Slowing Down the Flow
• Three cool recipes to bring exploratory testing to stage
• Mobbing with an Audience
• Testing in the iterative and incremental world
• 20 years of teaching testing
• That Pesky ToDo app
• Revisiting EPrimer, Three Times Over
• They Code With Me
• Dual-purpose Task Design
• Capture the Bugs - Feedback on learning how to test
• Breaking what you thought you knew about testing in 30 minutes

Important Concepts

• Funny how we talk of testing now (artifact vs activity)
• The Special Kinds of Testing that Aren't that Special
• Testing is a fascinating word
• The Artefact of Exploratory Testing
• The Three Cultures
• A sample of attended testing
• Using Vocabulary to Make Things Special
• Good Enough Quality Is Taking a Dip
• Testing gives me 3x4
• Testing is amplifying fail signals
• It took me two decades to get to quality engineering
• Dividing future of testing more evenly

Increasing Your Impact

• Five Controversial Ideas to Increase Your Impact as a Tester

Questions and Answers

• Exploratory Testing Essentials - Questions and Answers