s there a way to make exploratory testing just as accountable as pre-scripted testing without sacrificing the creativity of the exploratory approach? My brother Jonathan and I set this challenge for ourselves on a project in the summer of 2000. We wanted to give our client more than just a list of bugs and an invoice-- we wanted to provide an audit trail of our work along with meaningful productivity metrics. So, instead of counting test cases, we counted blocks of test design and execution time (test sessions) and recorded test results in a tagged text format that was then parsed to produce the metrics. This approached worked well, but proved to be quite challenging to manage, as Jonathan explains in the article. We think a lot of the difficulty is a by-product of the learning curve. We've stumbled into a new field here: test accounting. We're continuing to explore it. |