Exploratory Testing Reimagined

Maaret Pyhäjärvi gave a talk, Exploratory Testing Reimagined, last week. There's a blog post to go with it, so I won't say much on top of what's in my sketchnotes above, just pull out a few reflections.

I don't have the data or wide range of experience reports that Maaret does, but my own anecdotal results from using AI tools for testing align closely with what she says in the talk.

I have created skills to assist me, and my colleagues, in our testing work. For example, I used the contents of this blog and five years of test notes in my current role to distil a conversational workflow, facilitated by Claude, which runs through risk identification, test idea generation, and test mission creation. All four skills (the facilitation is its own skill) are backed by a fifth, on general testing theory and practice, and a sixth about how I like to interact with the AI: which notably includes that I want it to be concise, evidence-backed, well-structured, and critical.

I still supply and gather context, I still decide what to test and I still actually test. But I also take note of the additional context that is suggested by the tooling, of the risks I hadn't considered, and of the ideas that my experience didn't suggest to me.

I generate and share data from my testing sessions in public. Alongside test notes, which I continue to write by hand and publish on the company wiki, I share the transcripts of the sessions.

After about 50 such sessions I fed the transcripts back into the tooling and had it work out where there were repeated gaps or friction in our interactions, then suggest edits to the skills to reduce or remove them.

I have the AI build tools to help me test. In particular, I make one-off tools that I would not have the ability to create in a timely fashion without AI and which allow me to answer the questions I would always have had in a deeper or broader way, or at all. Sometimes these tools persist. One recent example is called compare-fe, a tool for diffing any two versions of a front-end client across a range of scenarios and across multiple useful metrics including usability, visual features, latency, and so on. It helped me to test a major refactoring work, but the developers have continued to find value from it away from that.

One thing that Maaret says in several ways in several places is absolutely key, in my experience, to getting to better results: give context and ask specific questions. That includes being open about when you're not sure about the context or the question, and it's what exploratory testing was and is always about.

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