Since Brian Marick pointed me in that direction, I started the investigation of Exploratory Testing driven development. It came to my mind, that I did not mean Exploratory Testing driven development, since Exploratory Testing is not driving the development. The more and more I thought about this the thing Brian pointed out seems to be Exploratory test infection rather than my first term. The term Exploratory Testing driven development is misleading, since the primary focus of the development should not be to have it properly set up for Exploratory Testing. Rather the value it delivers to the customer’s business is relevant. This might include easy information gathering during Exploratory Test sessions, but personally I think especially when performance is an issue the ability to do easy Exploratory Testing might conflict with intended business value.

Test infection describes the fact, that source code can be changed based on regression tests to assure no unintended changes in the behaviour as well as examples for the new changes – when considering test driven development. Therefore if you have a product which can be accessed easily within a Exploratory Test session for all the needed parameters a human tester might want to get to know, it should be called Exploratory test infected. Note that this definition goes beyond simply putting “everything” into some logfile. The human interaction within Exploratory Testing can go into directions which were not thought of during the development of the software.

The more I think over this I believe that there might not be a software which is fully Exploratory Testing infected. Due to this the engineer in me cries out for some measurement of the degree a software might be Exploratory Testing infected. During the next days I will think on possibilities for some measurement techniques for Exploratory Testing infection. Maybe I can then evaluate some popular software for this.

During the last week I got a seminar organised by my employer. During one of the lunch breaks I found some time to talk to one of our project managers. He stated, that he basically likes the Scrum method. Unfortunately there is one big thing, why he does not like Scrum at all: They do not need project managers.

This statement initiated some research interest within me. Since I have not yet found the time to read through Agile Software Development with Scrum by Mike Beedle and Ken Schwaber – it’s on my order list at amazon since end of January – and don’t know that much about Scrum, I would welcome any articles worth reading on the need for project management within agile projects.

My personal intention is to find out more about agile development and how to establish it within our organisation. My first try is to do this by showing how agility works within a small test automation project. Lately I got a lot of inspiration by reading several newsgroups on agile related topics and additionally I took my last vacation to do a review of Lisa Crispin’s and Janet Gregory’s upcomig book on agile testing (I would order it right away if it was finished, yet). For the project management part I would also like to provide a solution, since our organisation is used to work in a matrix organisation and I very confident, that agile projects – even when they are very complex – need of course someone to check interdependencies and lead the project to success.

If you have something on your list, that you would like to me read to get a better inside, please add a comment to this article. I would be very pleased.