It was my wedding anniversary recently. The picture at the top is the front of the card I got for my wife. Yeah, I know. Somehow she still loves me. I asked my family which bean out of the couple they thought I was and everyone chose the one on the left, including me. Surprised, I showed the picture to my work colleagues and they also unanimously went for the left-hand bean. Why? Here's some of the reasons I was given: the legs it's spilling its drink, like a man would the light reflecting off the top of the head the man always stands on the left in wedding pictures it looks like you I don't want to go deep into this, especially that last point, so I'll just observe that despite strong surface agreement there was significant hidden misalignment in motivation. Like so many projects I've bean on.
Maaret Pyhäjärvi posted the quote above on LinkedIn a few weeks ago. It speaks strongly to me so I asked Maaret if she'd written more (because she's written a lot ) on this specific point. She hasn't, and the sentence keeps coming back into my head and I'd like to understand why, so I thought I'd try to write down what I take from it. I think it's easy to skim read as some kind of definition of exploratory testing but that would be a mistake in my eyes. Testing by Exploring summarises how I felt last time I went into the definition in any depth and, for me, Maaret's quote is concerned with the why but says nothing of the what or how . But let's say we have a shared definition of exploratory testing, would I make this statement this baldly generally? No, I probably would not. Why? First, it's written in very personal terms (" my time", "the best testing I could") and, second, as a contex...