Spring GDS 25th Anniversary
A logistics company that ships to 190 countries built something to ship to itself.
Exploratory testing
What is exploratory testing?
Exploratory testing is hands-on, investigative testing where the tester designs and runs test cases in the moment, learning from each result and deciding what to try next. There's no pre-written script. The tester uses knowledge of the product, the users, and how software tends to break, then follows the trail. It's structured curiosity applied to finding the bugs nobody anticipated.
This contrasts with scripted testing, where every step and expected result is defined in advance and the tester simply executes them. Scripted and automated tests are excellent at confirming known behavior stays correct. They're poor at discovering the unknown, because they only check what someone already thought to write down. Exploratory testing covers that gap. A tester poking at a new booking feature might try booking in the past, then double-clicking submit, then switching languages mid-flow, uncovering issues no requirement ever mentioned. To keep it accountable rather than aimless, teams often run it in time-boxed sessions with a defined charter and notes on what was covered.
It rewards experience. A senior tester brings intuition about where defects hide, which turns a free-form session into a sharp one. Exploratory testing doesn't replace automated regression suites; it works alongside them. The automation guards what you know. The exploration finds what you missed.
Exploratory testing at Dallonses
We treat exploratory testing as the human counterweight to automation. Automated suites catch regressions fast and cheap, and we lean on them hard. But they only ever check what someone already imagined. So we put experienced eyes on new features, give them a charter and a time box, and let them go looking for the trouble scripts can't predict.
The findings tend to be the interesting ones: the weird input, the unexpected sequence, the assumption nobody questioned. When something real turns up, it doesn't just get fixed. It becomes a new automated test, so the bug stays dead. That loop, explore then automate, is how we keep a product's quality assurance sharp as it grows instead of brittle.
Worried about the bugs your test scripts will never think to look for? Let's go hunting.
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