TL;DR
Now that we know the first of three digestible diagrams created by Simon Thomes, Start with the Why let’s investigate the second diagram, The Testing Is The Learning Loop. This is a part of the Exploratory Testing Pathway. Many thanks to Marcel, who sublimed this great resource on his blog, That’s the buffet table.
The Testing Is Learning Loop
My wrong self taught conception about what is software testing was that software testing is confirmation that something works/does not work with the addition of finding as much as possible bugs in the application. That was the verification process. As I tested more applications, I realized that software testing is much more:
Software testing is the continuous learning loop about the product and its surrounding world.
In the diagram above, we can see that this learning loop is divided into three phases:
- Explore
- Capture
- Share
Explore
In the Explore phase, we define testing charter (learning direction) and using our heuristics (how to solve a problem) and oracles (how to recognize a problem), we do the exploratory testing activity.
Capture
We need to interrupt a testing activity to capture in the form of notes important learning information that we had found.
Share
After we finish our testing session, we share in the form of the report what we found out with a party of interest. This could be our test lead, test manager, or another fellow tester. We expect valuable input from our testing activities. It is essential to be able to explain the testing story of our activity.
