Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Test Design

In Exploratory Software Testing, leading software testing expert James A. Whittaker reveals the real causes of today’s most serious, well-hidden software bugs - and introduces powerful new “exploratory” techniques for uncovering them. Drawing on nearly two decades of experience working at the cutting edge of testing with Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Florida Tech, Whittaker introduces powerful new processes for manual testing that are repeatable, prescriptive, teachable, and effective. Whittaker identifies various types of exploratory testing, then shows when to use each, how to use them all successfully, and how to integrate them with existing automated testing methods. Concise, entertaining, and actionable, this book guides software professionals on the tactical and strategic decisions that can make or break their testing processes. Whittaker shows how to make manual testing more effective and less boring; offers specific guidance on choosing test cases; and shows how to reflect feedback from the development process. Above all, Exploratory Software Testing shows how to uncover the hidden “show-stopper” bugs that so often evade conventional testing.

James Whittaker has spent his career in software testing and has left his mark on many aspects of the discipline. He was a pioneer in the field of model-based testing, where his Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Tennessee stands as a standard reference on the subject. His work in fault injection produced the highly acclaimed runtime fault injection tool Holodeck, and he was an early thought leader in security and penetration testing. He is also well regarded as a teacher and presenter, and has won numerous best paper and best presentation awards at international conferences. While a professor at Florida Tech, his teaching of software testing attracted dozens of sponsors from both industry and world governments, and his students were highly sought after for their depth of technical knowledge in testing.

Dr. Whittaker is the author of How to Break Software and its series follow- ups How to Break Software Security (with Hugh Thompson) and How to Break Web Software (with Mike Andrews). After ten years as a professor, he joined Microsoft in 2006 and left in 2009 to join Google as the Director of Test Engineering for the Kirkland and Seattle offices. He lives in Woodinville, Washington, and is working toward a day when software just works.