Exploratory Testing Clean Recon Live Example

Using The Pulper v 1.2, I recorded a live recon session to try and create an example of note-taking, model building, risk identification, and next action identification. You can repeat the exercise for yourself and see how you get on.

Using The Pulper v 1.2, I performed a live recon session: github.com/eviltester/TestingApp/releases.

Reconnaissance Session

I described it as a "clean" recon, by which I mean

• Little to no prior planning
• Based purely on information provided by the app
• No tool support
• Unstructured text file for note taking

Other recon types include:

• Mental
• Biased/Prompted (Mnemonic, Template, Goal, etc.)
• Tool Assisted

Note-Taking

The note-taking makes a difference.

Plain Text allows me to write in any order, with no structure.

Mindmap enforces some structure and can lead to a physical structural model of the app. Mind-map is often good for Prompted recons.

I do other types of recons to build a rich model of the application. I do not rely on a single recon. I tend to start with a "clean" recon.

Lessons Learned and Actions Identified

I learned

• Even a "read-only app" has complexity
• Particularly around data oracles
• Even in a recon, we can spot bugs.

I need to identify

• How to compare pages of data in the app
• How to compare data on different pages within the app

I identified classes of tools I can use to support my testing:

• Link checkers
• HTML validators

But I recognize that these test the "syntax" or "structure" but not the semantics of the app, e.g. data is rendered correctly, but is the correct data rendered?

I used version 1.2 of The Pulper from https://github.com/eviltester/TestingApp/releases

Exercise

I recommend this as an exercise for you, or pick any app you are working on.

You can perform a "clean" recon, even on apps you know well. I programmed The Pulper, I was still able to take a fresh look at it in the recon and I gained value by doing so.

• Download version 1.2 of The Pulper from https://github.com/eviltester/TestingApp/releases
• Perform a clean recon
• Reflect on your notes
  • What did you find?
  • What did you learn?
  • What risks did you identify?
  • Did you spot any bugs?
  • What will you do next?
  • What tools do you have to research?

This article was syndicated from blog.eviltester.com. Author Alan Richardson is an Agile Software Development and Testing Consultant he has written 4+ books including Dear Evil Tester, Automating and Testing a REST API, Java For Testers. He has created 6+ online training courses covering Technical Web Testing, Selenium WebDriver and other topics. He is a prolific content creator on his blog, Youtube and Patreon.