May 18th, 2015 by Adam Sandman
automated testing software testing exploratory testing
Are you looking to improve your software testing? Are you tired of writing test cases 'the old fashioned way'. This article summarizes some of the key points from our recent Webinar on Manual & Exploratory Testing.
What is Exploratory Testing?
Exploratory testing is an approach to software testing that is concisely described as simultaneous learning, test design and test execution. Unlike traditional testing where you write up a test case with test steps and sample data ahead of time, exploratory testing occurs when the tester first sees an early iteration of an application and navigates through it, creating the test procedures and documentation whilst actually using it.
This approach is often used in agile methodologies when you don't have time in each Sprint to create a formal test specification and plan. This is especially so in early iterations where the user interface may be very fluid and the test specifications from previous Sprints would need to be largely rewritten.
Rapise from Inflectra makes this task much easier, as described in this webinar, Rapise lets you create a set of manual test cases by simply navigating through the application and then it will build your manual test case and test steps from the application being tested:
How to Record Manual Test Cases
Instead of creating test cases the “traditional way” by entering the test steps one at a time by hand and manually adding images, Rapise lets you simply interact with your application as if you were using it normally, and it will create the test case for you automatically:
With its built-in image capture functionality, Rapise will create the test steps using each of the operations you have performed, together with an image taken from either the entire application or from just the object that you interacted with. This results in a dramatic improvement in the time and effort to create test cases.
Playback of Manual Tests with Image Capture
Rapise lets you execute manual test cases stored in SpiraTest. The advantage of using Rapise to execute the manual tests (instead of just using SpiraTest itself) is that Rapise can display the execution window as a small minimizable dialog box that gets rid of the need to have two screens (one to display the test and one to test the application).
In addition, Rapise provides more powerful image manipulation tools over those available in a web application.
Hybrid Manual/Automated Testing
This is a useful technique when you want to have a predominantly manual test (executed by a tester) that has some steps that are automated by Rapise. These could be some of the initial setup tasks (e.g. logging in, starting the application) or just tasks that are well suited to automation.
You can enter the Rapise functions as the Description of the test step and Rapise will know to execute those specific steps automatically before displaying the manual test player.
To make this last process easier, if you have some lines of code in your Rapise test script that you want to include in a manual test case:
Then you can choose the name of this user scenario:
Upon clicking [OK], the lines of code will be exported into their own user scenario:
