Ad-hoc testing and Exploratory testing

Today’s post is just a MICRO blog about Ad-hoc testing and Exploratory testing

These two terms are often used interchangeably by the development guys. I wonder senior dev guys in my team don’t even know difference between black box & white box testing. Anyways coming back to our main topic both ad-hoc and exploratory testing

- are system testing techniques where in we test the whole software system.
- are undocumented form of testing in the sense that the test we perform are no formally documented. That is the scenarios in this testing are apart from the documented test cases.
- are informal testing techniques performed at small scale generally after the completion of formal testing OR when we have less time.

The only difference between these two is that in order to perform Ad-hoc testing a tester should have domain /product knowledge while no such knowledge is required for exploratory testing, success of ad-hoc testing totally depends on the knowledge and experience level of the tester. We can understand exploratory testing going be name , it means to explore the system with the intent of learning and also to find bugs. Main aim of tester performing exploratory testing is to get knowledge about the system and report bugs after getting them validated from a person having sound knowledge of the product. While the sole purpose of ad-hoc testing is to find bugs in the system as the tester already have the necessary knowledge about the system/product under testing. One important implementation of ADHOC TESTING is when we want to test the application beyond the documented OR obvious tests and also we may want to focus on most critical areas of application in case we have less time for testing and therefore can’t prepare test cases. For exploratory testing one such implication is when we do not have enough documentation available and want to know more about the application so that we can prepare some formal document regarding the functionality of the application.