hi my name is stephen and i'm here today to be your guide as you learn the ins and outs of exploratory testing let's begin before testing any product please make sure you have read the test instructions and understood what needs to be tested once you are familiar with the instructions and the areas that are in scope you can start your bug hunt the first step should always be to explore and understand the product you are about to test for example a web shop that sells different types of clothes does not work the same as a
website that offers grocery subscriptions so always take a general look around before you start searching for bugs when you approach the product that needs to be tested in an exploratory way the first thing to do is what is called positive testing when positive testing you as a tester will confirm the behaviors and functionalities mentioned in the feature descriptions and test instructions these should work how the customer expects them to work so any bugs found here are critical next you should try any reasonable negative test behaviors and by reasonable test behaviors i mean the types of
mistakes a typical inexperienced user might make note that i don't mean the situations where you press the exit button 500 times and then the 500 in first time the system crashes the customer would not find that reasonable in general there are some typical problem areas that you should always explore as a new tester for example any action that involves transferring data either posting data to the server or receiving data from the server might suffer from connectivity issues and there might be a bug you might also explore the authentication process as these are oftentimes difficult to
implement and are therefore a good target for bugs my next tip for you would be to start with infrequently used areas the checkout page is less likely to have bugs than a product list since the order process is the most important part of an e-commerce website and product owners normally make sure that at least the standard workflow is working similarly be sure to test other areas of the product such as the newsletter sign up the header and footer or any navigation testing the social media sharing buttons is also a good idea and oftentimes leads to
bugs additionally any newly implemented feature especially a complex one is always a ripe source for bug finding finally you might want to install several browsers and consider testing with all of them this will increase your chances of finding bugs in general you should ask yourself what features of the product have a number of different functionalities as there's a higher chance for you to come across a bug there a good example would be a product category or detail page because these pages normally allow users to select a size and color access the sizing guide add items
to the cart or to the wish list apply filters or sorting options and perhaps other custom functionality as well the more functionality the page has the more likely bugs are to occur so click on everything clickable try to reset elements try to abort and restart workflows and don't only follow the happy path and i guarantee that you will eventually find a bug to sum up every time you perform an action and don't get the expected result it might be a bug make further investigation and consider reporting it good luck in your first test run and
take care
