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Hi, Shmuel Gershon here.
And I want your help in analyzing an idea we had
for a solution for a specific problem:
I was invited by my friend Issi Hazan to teach with him
a course on Exploratory Testing.
It is a class that is a very short class,
only a couple of hours,
and the problem is
'How to teach all these ideas that we have to do Exploratory Testing in a practical way
in a way that they will know how it feels to do it,
and they'll know how to do it?'.
The solution that we've got here is a way to focus
on specific parts at a time.
So for example, if you want to take the Products Elements
(this is the Test Strategy Models by James Bach),
then you have these six options:
Structure, Function, Data, Platform, Operations and Time.
And if we want to look at quality characteristics,
then I like the Quality Characteristics by The Test Eye
- there are twelve of them.
So how to focus on them one at a time?
The idea is that if you want to
get an idea on which element to focus on,
you can just roll the SFDPOT dice and get one area to focus on.
So we got here to look at the 'Platform'
from the point of view of the other dice: 'Testability'.
How do you look at your platform and think about the testability it has?
What kind of hooks it has on a system level?
What kind of interfaces it gives to the outside,
what kind of logs it has?
When you are done learning and practicing these areas,
you can just roll the dice again:
And you may get 'Data' and you may get 'Portability'.
How do you look at the data of your product from the point of view of portability?
Does the data has good encoding which works on different systems?
What happens with the NewLine (LF) EndOfLine (CR) characters?
All this can give you very good ideas for
after you have explained the basic of these points,
to practice with the class.
It is also useful not only in classroom but when you are testing.
Sometimes you get stuck, and you need some clues of what to do next,
and it may be useful to just share the burned of decision
with the destiny and roll your exploratory testing dice.
Got to thank my wife for helping with the dice,
for being a good craftwoman and having a nice hand-writing.
And well, we would like to read what you think about it,
if you think it is a good idea,
or why you think it can NOT help you,
or if you know whether something like that is already available.
So thank you!