Off piste
Whether it’s known as off piste testing or explorative testing, there seems to be some value in tests that weren’t originally planned but suddenly come to mind. My question is: Should they have been planned in the first place?
I can understand straying off the path slightly when a defect is found and you go on the hunt for bug clusters. I can also appreciate that a person’s understanding of the system under test can grow as they use the code and so might discover additional areas that warrant testing. However, in this case I believe you should resort back to some formal test planning to ensure that an appropriate job is done of testing that area.
So what does that leave for off piste testing?
Obviously this assumes that you’ve done some formal test planning up front. I know this isn’t the case for everybody so I guess I can ask an alternative question int that case: If all your testing is done off piste (i.e. unplanned) then are you comfortable that all risk areas are being covered?
I think my preference would be to have a mixture of both, however I still can’t shake the feeling that off piste testing is simply areas that we’d forgotten to test!
Tags: bug clusters, explorative, off piste, test planning
February 27th, 2009 at 12:28
Good thoughts Scott – not off skiing are you?
I think if you look at this in an agile way then you accept that you can’t know everything up front and create your test plan to cover what you know, but allow for change.
The ‘off piste’ testing allows a bit of exploration and should be used to sanity check your test plan decisions. If it exposes a problematic area then great – adapt the plan to cope with it.
You could call ‘off piste’ ‘testing or verifying the test plan’. If it doesn’t find anything then your test plan was good. If it does, enhance the plan.