Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Test Design Review

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Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Test Design ReviewA few years back, I read "How to Break Software" by James Whittaker. I liked it. It wasn't wonderful, but it had a good batch of practical, useful tips. Then I read "How to Break Software Security" and "How to Break Web Software". I liked them as well, but not as much. Still, I figured I'd read James Whittaker's newest book "Exploratory Software Testing". Sadly, the downward progression of his writing continues. This book is by far the worst of the bunch.
Chapter 1 - "The Case for Software Quality" is nothing more than "software is terrific, but it has bugs". That's it, nothing more here.
Chapter 2 - "The Case for Manual Testing" talks a bit about testing, and tries to define exploratory testing. Whittaker's definition has apparently caused some controversy among some well-known practitioners of exploratory testing, so here is his perhaps unique definition:
"When the scripts are removed entirely (or as we shall see in later chapters, their rigidness relaxed), the process is called exploratory testing."
Whittaker then divides exploratory testing into two sections. Exploratory testing in the small is that which guides the tester to make small, distinct decisions while testing. Exploratory testing in the large guides the tester in how an application is explored more than how a specific feature is tested.
Chapter 3 - "Exploratory Testing in the Small" was, to me, the only useful chapter in the whole book. Here Whittaker offers practical advice with examples for thinking about constructing test data, software state, and test environment.
Chapter 4 - "Exploratory Testing in the Large" is where Whittaker dives into what appears to be the point of the whole book - his Tourist Metaphor. Apparently this is a big hit at Microsoft, but I found it pointless. Think about every type of testing you have ever performed. Now try to torture it into a phrase that ends with the word Tour. There you go - that's the chapter.
Just to give you a flavor, here's a list of all these Tours, and their variations:
The Guidebook Tour
Blogger's Tour
Pundit's Tour
Competitor's Tour
The Money Tour
Skeptical Customer Tour
The Landmark Tour
The Intellectual Tour
Arrogant American Tour
The FedEx Tour
The After-Hours Tour
Morning-Commute Tour
The Garbage Collector's Tour
The Bad-Neighborhood Tour
The Museum Tour
The Prior Version Tour
The Supporting Actor Tour
The Back Alley Tour
Mixed-Destination Tour
The All-Nighter Tour
The Collector's Tour
The Lonely Businessman's Tour
The Supermodel Tour
The TOGOF Tour
The Scottish Pub Tour
The Rained-Out Tour
The Couch Potato Tour
The Saboteur Tour
The Antisocial Tour
Opposite Tour
Crime Spree Tour
Wrong Turn Tour
The Obsessive-Compulsive Tour
Perhaps the idea of calling UI Testing a Supermodel Tour appeals to you, and will make for a richer, more productive set of tests. I don't get it. I just don't see any value here. Doesn't testing have enough variation in language and definitions already, without adding this silliness?
Chapter 5 - "Hybrid Exploratory Testing Techniques" tells us that it's acceptable to combine scenario testing with exploratory testing. Then it spends time rehashing each of the tours from Chapter 4 and tries to suggest a side trip for each.
Chapter 6 - "Exploratory Testing in Practice" presents essays written by several Microsoft testers describing how they each used one or more of the tours in a testing situation. It appears as if Whittaker instructed his charges to write a "What I did this summer"-style essay, in the form of "How I used Tours to do my testing".
Chapter 7 - "Touring and Testing's Primary Pain Points" tries to tell us (in a few paragraphs) how to avoid five pain points - Aimlessness, Repetiveness, Transiency, Monontony, and Memorylesness. There's little real instruction here. For example, we are told that in order to avoid repetitiveness, we must know what testing has already occurred, and understand when to inject variation. Uhm, ok.
Chapter 8 - "The Future of Software Testing" has nothing at all to do with the other chapters, or exploratory testing. It's basically Whittaker's gee-whiz vision of what might be possible (some day) in the future. Perhaps. Whittaker has given this talk in several webinars - it's simply rehashed here.
Since these chapters take up only 136 pages, and obviously aren't enough to fill out a real book, three unrelated appendices are bolted on. A few pages about Testing as a career, and a bunch of pages lifted directly from Whittaker's blogs fill out the book to over 200 pages.
If you really want to learn about Exploratory Testing, this is probably not the place. "Exploratory Software Testing" is fluff - stretched and tortured out barely to book-length. There's not much in the way of learning here.
And if Microsoft testers are really instructed to "Tell me what kind of testing you did today, and make sure it ends with the word Tour", then I feel very sorry for them.Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Test Design Overview

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Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition Review

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Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition ReviewWith respect to some of the previous reviewers, I really don't think they have done justice to this book. I'll completely expose my inner geek and admit that curriculum design is fascinating to me, and add that I own a considerable number of books on the topic. I am particularly interested in differentiating curricula, and I purchase books about educational theory and classroom ideas the way other women purchase shoes--insatiably. I have constantly challenged myself to create personalized lessons with meaningful learning goals throughout my teaching career, but I will say that this book has definitely changed the way I view teaching and curricular design--and for the better.
I liked this book because it embraces the numerous messy variables that exist in the real world of teaching, and provides a template for you to construct meaningful, integrated learning activities for students. These messy variables include differing student interests and abilities, the struggle to keep activities engaging as well as applicable to important premises of a given discipline, as well as logistical restraints, such as time and access to resources. Other models provide neat flow charts that look beautiful, but often prove unusable given a unique teaching situation (and who doesn't have a unique teaching situation?) This philosophy expects messy variability, and gives a vision and a plan to work with that, instead of hoping everything will turn out neatly.
Here are some of the huge ideas I got from this book. First, it is essential to clarify the "so what?" of whatever you are teaching--the big ideas, the principles of the field, the "It" things you want students to come away with. I have always done this instinctively, but I have not been so great about communicating those principles clearly and repeatedly to students (and parents and colleagues). The idea that students can be actively involved in the philosophy and understanding behind the curricular design (as well as, of course, make choices as part of the lessons), was a light bulb for me. Also, teaching often tends to become scattered with lots of facts and pressure to "cover" information, and clarifying these big ideas and working from there makes intuitive sense--if it doesn't connect to the big ideas you've established as critical, then the lesson doesn't belong. Perhaps these ideas seem like huge "duh" statements, but in the real world of teaching, I think very few people manage to adequately establish the critical issues, articulate and refer to them with students, and connect them to related ideas throughout the term. This book really is a valuable resource for doing the hard, thinking work that teachers really are capable of doing. It provides direction in an environment bound by paperwork and directives that have us running in circles. It is not the idea of backward design that's revolutionary, but the practicality of the technique that aligns so well with what good teachers instinctively know works best.
The reviewer who took issue with the philosophy as being problematic because it was inherently incapable of being truly student-driven raises an interesting point, but I'm not sure it's really a downfall of the book. There are very few schools (with a notable exception profiled on 60 Minutes some years ago) which allow students to determine what they will study based solely on their interests. I appreciate the question, and it's a worthy one to discuss--after all, is it only worthwhile to investigate and learn about things that really interest us? Or should every person be responsible for a core set of knowledge before branching into specialization in a field? Most schools operate with the latter premise and have requisite standards to be met, so a student-driven curriculum is not an option for most teachers. Further, a central tenet of the book relates to designing curricula so that students will "uncover" truths--rather than having a teacher or textbook "tell it" to them--students uncover meaning in an authentic way as it relates to a given topic in a discipline. To me, this is meaning-making--learning--at its best.
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The Definition of a Profession Review

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The Definition of a Profession ReviewAnyone who has ever done field research knows that you have to sell authority figures on the merit of what you are doing. Social Scientists don't always like to think of themselves in this way, but it is a necessity. This book explores the brilliant insight that early intelligence testers adopted a medical metaphor, and did so in a way that was remarkably similar to their contemporaries in the dental field. And both established credibility first in the schools as a means towards social progress. I, for one, knew absolutely nothing about dentistry at the turn of the last century before reading this book. Nor did I ever suspect it was relevant to my interests in standardized testing and personality. This book neither criticizes testing, nor praises it. It merely explains the process by which a group of researchers established credibility of their field - and it does so very well.
{If history of testing is a topic of interest, I would rate higher - a 5}.
It is a good companion to The Big Test: The Secret History of the American MeritocracyThe Definition of a Profession Overview

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