Synthetic Exploratory Testing is a new approach to testing that can exercise more of an app's functionality in less time than other testing methods.
What is exploratory testing?
Exploratory testing is a method of manual software testing where learning the app's behavior, test case designing, and test case execution all happen concurrently.
Exploratory testing yields results faster than typical manual testing as no time is spent with upfront test case design.
The major drawback of exploratory testing is that it is typically manual. As with other types of manual testing, it is slow. The amount of coverage that can be achieved is limited by the number of testers and the time available.
Additionally, the manual nature of exploratory testing means that the time invested has a high opportunity cost. The return on that investment can be realized only once, while that same time invested in creating automated tests would realize a return each time the test is executed.
Exploratory Testing also suffers from a lack of traceability and reproducibility. When encountering a bug, the lack of traceability makes it hard to determine the exact steps needed to reproduce it.
What is Synthetic Exploratory Testing?
Synthetic Exploratory Testing has the same benefits of manual exploratory testing while addressing many of its shortcomings.
Synthetic Exploratory Testing automatically learns the app's behavior, automatically creates tests and automatically executes them.
As Synthetic Exploratory Testing is an automated process, it is much faster than manual exploratory testing. Much more of the app's behavior can be exercised in a given amount of time.
As the Synthetic Exploratory Testing platform is storing both the tests it creates and the results, every test has full traceability and potential for reproducibility. The Synthetic Exploratory Testing platform is able to re-execute the tests as many times as necessary. After learning the app's behavior during its initial scans, it is able to identify any changes in that behavior in subsequent scans.
Integrating Synthetic Exploratory Testing into your testing plan
UI level Synthetic Exploratory Testing is the perfect complement to unit testing, functional testing, and manual testing. Its ability to quickly exercise an app's behavior, both broadly and deeply, makes it a perfect complement to manual and automated integration testing. The Synthetic Exploratory Testing platform's ability to quickly examine the test results position it well to augment automated functional testing.
Synthetic Exploratory Testing is also valuable in regression testing, where simply knowing if the app's behavior has changed is enough.
Benefits of Synthetic Exploratory Testing
- Synthetic Exploratory Testing significantly reduces time to coverage. This increased coverage will catch more bugs.
- Synthetic Exploratory Testing augments your current test investments and generates a higher return than manual exploratory testing.
