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- Shannon, I know a lot of teams

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that really struggle
with exploratory testing.

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They haven't done it
before, and maybe they

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understand that there's value in it,

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but they're not sure they
understand how to do it at all.

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Fortunately, there are a lot of good books

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on exploratory testing, like
the one we talked about,

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Elizabeth Hendrickson's "Explore It".

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And we also cover it a lot in our books,

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"SL Testing" and "More SL Testing".

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But besides reading books,
what else could people do?

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- Well, what I've seen some
teams do is take the book

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and instead of just reading
it, have a book club.

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Sometimes it's read a
chapter, then discuss it.

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To practice exploratory testing,

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I would suggest taking
a chapter, reading it,

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and then actually practicing
those techniques together.

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Maybe as a brown bag lunch, even.

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I've had many teams tell
me that they've actually

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had success doing things like that,

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not necessarily in exploratory testing,

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but other kinds of things.

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It comes down to the idea
of deliberate practice,

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making time to practice.

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We are going to learn this skill,

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and then really trying it.

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- Yeah. It always feels hard to practice

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when there's so much to
do and we feel so busy.

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I'm too busy drowning
to learn how to swim.

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But, look at a lot of other professions.

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Musicians, they practice.

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Artists practice.

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And even programmers practice with things

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like coding dojos, code retreats.

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They write code that
they're going to throw away

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just so they can get better at it.

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We can do that with testing as well.

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One of the things I've done is to just

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bring in some games and
just practice testing those.

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We can have personas
actually testing games.

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- Yeah, I've had some success
with some of the games too.

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Or, if you go to a website
like TastyCupcakes,

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there's a lot of games on there

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that help you practice something
very, very specifically.

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So really trying to use those games

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to help you learn, I think is important.

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- Yeah, that's true.

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And it's fun too.

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- Yeah.

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We also might be able to
pair with a product owner

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to practice real examples.

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That's deliberate practice.

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We need to know how to do that.

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Don't wait for a meeting to come up.

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Practice them.

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Or maybe talk with a designer or

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maybe a marketing guy to learn more

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about your customer's business.

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Learn about the domain,
how they use their product.

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In one company I was with, we actually,

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as part of our orientation,

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we sat with the customer support people.

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We had headsets and we
listened to help calls.

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It was a real...

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An eyeopener.

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How bad was our software?

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It wasn't very pleasant, but
that is deliberate practice

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if you make that part of what you do,

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getting those understandings.

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- Right.

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Look, going back to the book club idea,

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I really like what you said about

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practicing it with your teammates.

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My team did a book club.

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We read Jeff Patton's
"User Story Mapping".

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So we actually...

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We did this at lunch time, and we actually

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storymapped some of our real stories,

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just to see how it worked

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and introduced it to the rest of the team.

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That's a fun to do it.

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- Did it go well?

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- Well, we got a lot
of benefits out of it.

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We didn't get the team
to adopt storymapping,

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but within out testing team,

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it turned out to be quite useful, so.

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So in summary, whether you
work for a small startup

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or a large globally
distributed enterprise,

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apply the seven key success factors

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and six confidence building practices.

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- Work together to improve your ability

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to succeed with both testing and quality.