Exploring Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing is an approach concept of software testing where the tester combines application learning, test design and test execution in the same activity. This approach can showcase the results that a skilled tester can provide with manual tests as it recognizes that the next test we do is influenced by the result of the last test we did. It is Agile in nature as it emphasizes the tester's autonomy, skill and creativity.
The main advantage of exploratory testing is that less preparation is needed, important bugs are found quickly, and at execution time, the approach tends to be more intellectually stimulating than execution of scripted tests, but it is not a replacement for scripted and automated tests. It is more a complementary approach that provides additional software quality practices to the software testing activity.

it emphasizes the tester's autonomy, skill and creativity, much as other Agile practices emphasize these qualities in developers; - See more at: http://guide.agilealliance.org/guide/exploratory.html#sthash.p0JjXh3E.dpuf

it emphasizes the tester's autonomy, skill and creativity, much as other Agile practices emphasize these qualities in developers; - See more at: http://guide.agilealliance.org/guide/exploratory.html#sthash.p0JjXh3E.dpuf

References

Exploratory testing on Wikipedia

What is Exploratory Testing? (And How it Differs from Scripted Testing)

Exploratory Testing

Exploratory Testing

Exploratory Testing - Agile Alliance Guide

Exploratory Testing

Exploratory Testing

Exploratory Testing: Finding the Music of Software Investigation

Changing Team Mindsets to Adopt Exploratory Testing

Test Driven Development Pitfalls

Test Driven Development (TDD) has been one of the most adopted agile practice. It has bring back the importance of unit testing, but also mostly remind that people have to think about what their code really want to achieve before writing it.

Test-driven development that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: first the developer writes an (initially failing) automated test case, then produces the minimum amount of code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. Kent Beck, who is credited with having developed or 'rediscovered' the technique, stated in 2003 that TDD encourages simple designs and inspires confidence. However, how simple this might appears, it is not easy to perform this approach successfully on the long term.

Two interesting articles published in the Methods & Tools free software development magazine might help you  to do this. Test Driven Development (TDD) Traps by Jakub Nabrdalik presents all the issues that a agile software developer might face when trying to apply TDD and explains how to overcome them. Writing Testable Code by Isa Goksu explain how to write a code that will be easy to test... and then easy to refactor. This two articles are a good read for every software developer that believes in the power of unit testing to achieve quality in software code.

Which Tool to Manage Requirements Management?

The RequirementsManagement.net web site has published the results of a short survey about the usage of software requirements management tools used to create and manage the definition of requirements (text, user stories, models,…). The result is that there is no clear winner in the poll even if office software is the number one tool used to manage requirements (27% of respondents).20% of the participants answered that they use more than one tool.

Cloud Computing and SOA

SOA and Cloud Computing is an article that explains why Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a good fit for cloud-based deployments and how the cloud affects SOA. SOA principles and patterns are a very good match for the cloud, because SOA is the architectural style that enables transition to cloud computing, especially for hybrid and public cloud scenarios.

Fall 2011 issue of Methods & Tools

Methods & Tools – the free magazine for software developers, testers and project managers – has just published its Fall 2011 issue with the following articles that focuses mainly on user interface and project management practices:
* Dialogue Sheets for Scrum Retrospectives – Helping Scrum Improvement
* Using Models and Standards – Tools for Software Processes
* The Psychology of UX – Understand your Users
* HTML5 for Rich Web Enterprise Applications – What Does HTML5 Brings to the Web?
* Gradle – a revolutionary Groovy based build tool
* Saros – an Eclipse plug-in for Distributed Programming
* StarUML – an Open Source UML tool