About three hours ago I got involved in a twitter-discussion with James Bach (@jamesmarcusbach) and Michael Bolton @michaelbolton). The discussion was all about how to call automated testing in conjunction with exploratory testing (ET).
The knee-jerk reaction would be to call it “automated exploratory testing” or “exploratory test automation”. Sounds good and without much ado we could put that into a test strategy/plan of some sort. But… what are we really saying? Just put yourself in the shoes of an unexperienced project manager or line manager. I could see a converstationlike the one below:
Tester: “We will be doing automated exploratory testing!”
PM: “Cool! I like that idea. …hmmmm… so you mean after some test scripting we can get rid of all those testers! Wow! Double cool!”
Tester: “No, no”
PM: “Getting confused here. Alredy wrote here ‘decrease test effort by $50k’.”
Tester: “That’s not what I said. I meant….”
PM: “So no automated exploratory testing?”
Tester: “No. What I meant was….”
PM: “On a different topic altogether,….”
Testing is really great in choosing terminology that misleads non testing people in not getting it. This being one example.
What we want to say is that exploratory testing can use automation to facilitate the process of exploring. In the wider sense automation is just one part of our “bag of goodies” that we carry around. It is a powerful and sometimes inevitable tool but it does neither exploring nor testing. All automation can really do is checking (check out Michael Bolton’s blog on checking vs. testing http://www.developsense.com/blog/) and supporting manual testing.
So I’d suggest something like “tool-supported exploratory testing”. It clearly defines action and scope. John Bach (@jbtestpilot) commented that the dash based names were not so ideal and I do tend to agree. For the moment though I’d see it as the only really viable option bar something completely new (like Bionic testing, Remote control testing – thanks John). I personally would love to have an acronym like ETX. I have so far failed at finding the long version for ETX though.
What this discussion has sparked in me though is to think twice about the terminology I use. The pitfalls are plenty and easy to fall into. So my advice to testers is to start caring about what you call things. It might propell your testing into a favourable direction and do away with the constant need to correct mis-conceptions.
Thanks James, Michael, Ben (Simo, @QualityFrog) and John for a great twitter session!
Tags: automation, exploratory, Testing
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Michael Bolton and janetgregoryca, Oliver Erlewein. Oliver Erlewein said: Little blog post on current twitter discussion on #exploratory #testing and #test #automation naming. http://bit.ly/8ZE5Ry [...]
When two terms could become confusing when combined, e.g. test automation and exploratory testing, why combine them in the first place? They could be explained nicely without combining them into a new definition. You prevent confusion.
@Michel: Generally you’re right but there’s already (wrong) names out there. So this looks like a try to clean-up after the fact.