Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality Engineering

Structured Exploratory Testing Strategies That Work - Callum Akehurst-Ryan

Listen Later
Using Exploratory Testing to Uncover Risks and Unknowns in Software Projects

📘 Free e-book: The 7 success factors of software testing. 25 years of project experience in one 33-page workbook, now also in English 👉 Get it for free

"We do exploratory testing when things are unknown. But from the unknown, we get information. That makes things known." - Callum Akehurst-Ryan

In this episode, I talk with Callum Akehurst-Ryan, a quality coach with nearly 20 years of experience, about why exploratory testing is far more than random button-pushing—and how teams waste it by using it in all the wrong places. Callum walks us through practical exploratory testing techniques that help uncover risks in non-functional requirements like performance and security, especially when no one has bothered to document what "good" should look like. We discuss how to structure exploration with timeboxes and risk-based scopes, when to turn findings into automated tests, and why retrofitting quality into existing systems demands a different software testing strategy than most teams realize.

Callum Akehurst-Ryan (he/him) is a testing specialist and quality coach with over 17 years of experience across a range of different industries and development methodologies. With a focus on holistic quality engineering and exploratory testing, Callum teaches others in core and agile testing concepts. He’s also a kick-ass dungeon master!

Highlights:

  • Exploratory testing covers unknown territory: it runs experiments to gather information where no requirement or expected result exists, not to confirm a known outcome.
  • Time-boxing exploration to a fixed session, then checking with the team before continuing, prevents both endless rabbit holes and work on defects nobody will fix.
  • Exhaustive testing is mathematically impossible: the character combinations for a single 100-character input field exceed the number of seconds the universe has existed.
  • Findings from exploratory sessions should feed scripted or automated tests once the behavior is understood, because exploratory testing is a poor mechanism for repeatable regression checks.
  • Golden master testing, capturing what a live system currently does and writing tests to confirm it stays that way, is a valid strategy for retrofitting regression coverage when original requirements are gone.
    • ...more
    View all episodesView all episodes
    Download on the App Store
    Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality EngineeringBy Richard Seidl | Software Development & Testing Expert