About Exploratory Testing
Cem Kaner, who coined the term Exploratory Testing, described it as "a style of software testing that emphasizes the personal freedom and responsibility of the individual tester.” During this freeform, intuitive approach to testing, the testing steps and path are not predefined and have to be manually captured. The flow and steps of a testing session are important for effective communication between testers and developers. At Inflectra, we strive to make this communication faster and easier.
Stage 1: Exploratory Testing Mode
In version 5.3 of SpiraTest’s testing module, we added a dedicated exploratory testing mode. Any test case marked as “exploratory” is run in this mode. Here, a tester can edit everything about their testing session on the fly: capturing what they are doing as they are doing it in a way that other testers or devs can easily follow. They can rerun the same testing session and change or refine it each time. Once exploring a new feature is complete the test can be turned into a regression test, if needed.
Stage 2: Capture Your Testing Session Automatically
Customers (and our in-house testers) love our exploratory testing mode. It has become an essential part of many businesses QA workflow. But, there are times when you want to know exactly what you did to produce a problem in an application under test. What sequence of clicks or url changes got the app into that weird state? By recording everything significant that the tester does, automatically, in the background, a whole session can be reviewed, one click at a time.
Introducing SpiraCapture
Today we are launching SpiraCapture, Inflectra’s new Chrome extension. SpiraCapture intelligently records and organises your whole testing session. When you discover an issue, you can select the exact sequence that reproduces the problem and log it as incident into the right Spira product. SpiraCapture works with versions of SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, and SpiraPlan 6.1 and above, and is free of charge.
How does SpiraCapture work?
SpiraCapture will record any tabs you want in Chrome. It tracks actions such as clicks and keystrokes automatically on each tab being recorded. While testing, you can add Steps to help organize where you are in your testing session. You can also add notes to remind yourself of when a specific issue happened.
What to do with your data?
It’s easy to look at your captured testing data: during testing, or at the end of a session. The data is broken up by the Steps you have made, and by the testing time. Web applications can be messy, but we have designed SpiraCapture to capture data so that the developer will know exactly what was clicked, or where text was entered.
Each event recorded can be selected and then saved in Spira as an incident. Login to Spira, choose a project and incident type and give the incident a title. Any data and images you have selected get included with the incident. All you have to do is get back to testing and let us handle the capturing!
Our new SpiraCapture tool is free for anyone to use. The built-in preview option, makes communication even easier. It shows what information will get sent to SpiraTest, in plain and portable HTML. If you don’t have SpiraTest, you can copy and paste the HTML into whatever application you want. The data never leaves Chrome, and no sign up to any account with Inflectra is needed.
What's next?
You can install the extension from the Chrome Store. We can’t wait to see how you use SpiraCapture 1.0. We’d love to hear your ideas about the future of SpiraCapture, so please get in touch.