Friday, March 8, 2013

Explore It! by Elisabeth Hendrickson

I just finished reading one of the best software testing books out there.  It's a brand new book on exploratory testing by Elisabeth Hendrickson, called Explore It!.  During my reading of this book, I found myself wanting to tell every Tester I  know to go out and buy this book....and I've been doing just that!  I think what I liked the most about Explore It! was how easy it was to read.  And by easy, I don't mean dumbed down.  There's some complex stuff in there, but Elisabeth wrote it in such a way that no matter if you're a new Tester or an experienced Tester, you're going to get something out of it.  Like an explorer, she walks you through the many journeys of testing software, to think as an explorer just as you would if you were Lewis and Clark.  That's a pretty cool thing to keep in mind. 

My goal is to reuse the things I've learned in this book over and over again.  For example, I've not really done a lot with charters, but I'm inspired to use them more from what I've just learned.  It's clear things like this take practice.  But isn't that what will make us the great Testers we want to be?  I also really liked how she explained helping your exploratory testing using diagramming state models, variations with variables, exploring with requirements, following the data, and her list of heuristics at the back of the book.  I've known and used a lot of these things in the past, but it's a great resource to have it in one place and again, Elisabeth explains it in such away that makes it easy to grab for a quick inspiration!