Ad-hoc Testing
“Adhoc” meaning “Purpose” ,
Yes, we do the Adhoc testing for a special purpose, the purpose is to find the hidden bugs in the software which we might have missed in the Planned Test (Traditional way of testing Unit, SIT, ST, Regression and UAT), which we might have missed in the requirement, which we might have over-sighted. It’s not really easy task to imagine and visualize or have every possible test scenario in one go. We try to cover and map every requirement with test scenario but there are possibilities of missing the things when we have less visibility of the system.
So to improve upon the quality of tests I feel the Adhoc testing is necessary where we can really try those scenarios which haven’t covered in initial phases.
Again I really doubt whether we do testing or checking of a software with traditional way? What I mean is we are just doing the verification of the requirements against the develop product. (Just compare the expected against actual outputs) but are we really testing the software, are we really providing the customer/user the desired quality? How much importance are we giving to the Ad-hoc test in our Test Plan?
Please don’t get me wrong the Planned test is critical and important otherwise we won’t be sure about the User’s Expectations and the desired outputs from the software. But what about those critical situations which we may miss in the planned activity? We are human beings, we tend to make mistakes/errors or sometimes lazy. But at the same time we learn, correct our past mistakes, we are intelligent enough to take a preventive as well as corrective action on our mistakes/errors.
Ad hoc testing is a chance to correct out mistakes and find out those missing or “un-explored” defects/errors which may cause a hug damage in future. Yes we do agree upon this is not at all a structured test, and I there the strength of this lies. Here we just focus upon How I will be cracking the system? In what circumstances the software may behave weird? What is that situation which I haven’t came across/explored? Basically it has no boundaries to thinking and this time we have software in front of us to explore, discover and play with like a Intelligent “Child intending” to crack. Once we succeed, we can document the scenario and include that into our “Planned Test Cycle” so this way we can make it structured too!
Yes, I have used a word above “un-explored”, we can call Ad-hoc test as Exploratory test also. Why because in this “purpose test”, we are Learning, Exploring the software and trying to find out more defect which are critical.
Ad-hoc mean continuous learning, exploring, discovering of a software.
I feel we should give importance to the Ad-hoc/Exploratory test to improve upon the quality of the software. I will say up to 30-40% of test time we should spend upon Ad-hoc test. And then we can see the beauty of the software.
Please let me know your views.
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