This video shows how well designed test plans can achieve full pairwise testing coverage with a very small number of tests. And as the total number of permutations increase exponentially as more parameters and parameter values are added properly designed test plans can provide full pairwise coverage with very few tests.
This is not possible for a person to manually do but using the right algorithms to create a test plans can provide amazing benefits.
The end users were the people with the most practical knowledge, but they had no IT or QA background. The testers lacked the proper financial background and the day-to-day experience. To solve this, the testers and end users were asked to sit together in small work groups (four to five people each) and come up with stories based on the most extreme examples that had happened, or that could happen in practice. Imagination was invited and exaggeration was welcome. To help the process, I asked the groups to imagine that they were writing soap operas.
Michael Bolton (from the video):
I am so excited by Hans’ presentation… He has touched on this fork, and the fork is, are we going to confirm repeatedly, relentlessly, the same stuff, that we have seen over and over and over again (which I worry sometimes the action word stuff drives us into) or are we going to do really exciting stuff that soap opera is good for. Which is to actually investigate what happens when things are non-routine and things are non-routine far more often than we believe. I love the soap opera concept, I absolutely love it.
Hans:
Exploratory testing is all about curiosity. If you are not curious you do not find bugs…
Hans also mentions “exploratory test design” where you think about the business (not the User Interface UI).
This idea of planning exploratory testing is often overlooked. It is important to think about the critical business rules and how those ideas should be tested. Planning out areas and concepts that need to be covered during exploratory testing is important. Soap Opera Testing can help with this, as can Hexawise test plans which help you consider interaction effects.
