- Shannon, I know a lot of teams
that really struggle with exploratory testing.
They haven't done it before, and maybe they
understand that there's value in it,
but they're not sure they understand how to do it at all.
Fortunately, there are a lot of good books
on exploratory testing, like the one we talked about,
Elizabeth Hendrickson's "Explore It".
And we also cover it a lot in our books,
"SL Testing" and "More SL Testing".
But besides reading books, what else could people do?
- Well, what I've seen some teams do is take the book
and instead of just reading it, have a book club.
Sometimes it's read a chapter, then discuss it.
To practice exploratory testing,
I would suggest taking a chapter, reading it,
and then actually practicing those techniques together.
Maybe as a brown bag lunch, even.
I've had many teams tell me that they've actually
had success doing things like that,
not necessarily in exploratory testing,
but other kinds of things.
It comes down to the idea of deliberate practice,
making time to practice.
We are going to learn this skill,
and then really trying it.
- Yeah. It always feels hard to practice
when there's so much to do and we feel so busy.
I'm too busy drowning to learn how to swim.
But, look at a lot of other professions.
Musicians, they practice.
Artists practice.
And even programmers practice with things
like coding dojos, code retreats.
They write code that they're going to throw away
just so they can get better at it.
We can do that with testing as well.
One of the things I've done is to just
bring in some games and just practice testing those.
We can have personas actually testing games.
- Yeah, I've had some success with some of the games too.
Or, if you go to a website like TastyCupcakes,
there's a lot of games on there
that help you practice something very, very specifically.
So really trying to use those games
to help you learn, I think is important.
- Yeah, that's true.
And it's fun too.
- Yeah.
We also might be able to pair with a product owner
to practice real examples.
That's deliberate practice.
We need to know how to do that.
Don't wait for a meeting to come up.
Practice them.
Or maybe talk with a designer or
maybe a marketing guy to learn more
about your customer's business.
Learn about the domain, how they use their product.
In one company I was with, we actually,
as part of our orientation,
we sat with the customer support people.
We had headsets and we listened to help calls.
It was a real...
An eyeopener.
How bad was our software?
It wasn't very pleasant, but that is deliberate practice
if you make that part of what you do,
getting those understandings.
- Right.
Look, going back to the book club idea,
I really like what you said about
practicing it with your teammates.
My team did a book club.
We read Jeff Patton's "User Story Mapping".
So we actually...
We did this at lunch time, and we actually
storymapped some of our real stories,
just to see how it worked
and introduced it to the rest of the team.
That's a fun to do it.
- Did it go well?
- Well, we got a lot of benefits out of it.
We didn't get the team to adopt storymapping,
but within out testing team,
it turned out to be quite useful, so.
So in summary, whether you work for a small startup
or a large globally distributed enterprise,
apply the seven key success factors
and six confidence building practices.
- Work together to improve your ability
to succeed with both testing and quality.