Courses

The core idea of designing and building these courses is to center a single application per course, and teach exploratory testing as it makes sense for that application. Together we hope the examples give you a good wider perspective teaching into many things important in testing.

Things about projects are hard to teach with a snapshot of an application and we will most likely include case studies of projects to support mapping of what you may have as starting point in a project to what you would do.

Online live sessions are posted on our Tito.

Contemporary Exploratory Testing Foundations

Materials (Updated 2024-08-04): [slides v2.3, incl. pytest-playwright] [slides with notes incl. pytest, material 2.3 level] [slides v2.2, incl. robotframework] [slides with notes incl. pytest, material 2.1 level; 8546 readers by Aug 4th 2024]

Welcome to Exploratory Testing Foundations -course. This course intertwines a simple application (E-Primer) to test with basic theory of how to do exploratory testing to give you a foundation to build on.

Exploratory testing is an approach to testing that centers learning. Test design and test execution form an inseparable pair where the application and feature we are testing is our external imagination. It takes domain knowledge, requirements and specifications, and testing knowledge as input and produces information and a better tester as an output. It usually also encourages us to at least consider documentation and test automation as a form of documentation.

I think of this course as an antidote to the idea that test cases tell you how to test a feature and that is where a new tester would start. That type of test cases are only a small subset. You are expected to find defects, where the system does not work as we specified but not stop there. Finding change requests, things that would make things better for users is included. And instead of using most of your work time on documentation, I'm inviting you to consider lighter and executable formats of documenting.

This is what we fit into one day with one application. Theory and applying the theory go hand in hand. When taught in classroom, we will also reflect course experiences to work experiences and share stories of testing in projects where applicable.

Exploratory Testing Foundations by Maaret Pyhäjärvi is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Exploratory Unit Testing

Work on this content has started but progress is sporadical

On Exploratory Unit Testing -course, we do exploratory testing on a unit level. We'll work with a few examples, and extensive programming understanding is not necessary. Programming knowledge won't hurt either.

Real-World Exploratory Testing

Work on this content has been sporadical starting 2021

On Real-World Exploratory Testing -course, we look at testing an application that is web technologies frontend and backend. The programmer community has built a demo application we believe is not riddled with bugs, but also does not come with a strong accompanying suite of programmed tests nor a good idea of how applications like this would be tested.

This course looks at exploratory testing on user interface level (documenting with automation), on API level and on unit testing level. How would you test Conduit?