I've been pondering about this blog post since I saw the Ministry of Testing discussion post and to be honest, I really struggled to interpret it. I mean, how do I define essential skills exactly? To help me structure my thoughts for this post, I'll be interpreting "The Essential Skills for Testing" to be "What skills are useful for a great tester?" Strong communication skills Let's be honest, we've all met people who claim they have communication skills or even strong communication skills and you can't help but roll your eyes. Like wth does that even mean? In my opinion, strong communication skills (for a tester) means that a tester is: Able to communicate exactly what, where, why, how, etc they have tested in such a way that the team understands what they did Able to communicate exactly what, where, why, how, etc they will test a feature (etc) in such a way that the team understands what they plan to do, and can help expand on those ideas/or
Before we dive into the importance of Exploratory Testing, I would like to clear three things up. Firstly, I align with this definition of Exploratory Testing, by Cem Kamer, it is an approach to software testing that consists of simultaneous learning, test design and test execution. Secondly, I don't think Exploratory Testing has to be a substitute for test cases, it can complement test cases. (It's up to you, how or if you choose to combine both Exploratory Testing and Test cases when you test a feature) Lastly, exploratory testing is not adhoc testing - adhoc testing is random, unstructured testing, exploratory testing forced you to think critically about the application under test. (For more about the difference go here .) Job Interview Analogy To illustrate the importance of Exploratory Testing, I'd like to first use the analogy of a job interview. (I wrote about this in a previous blog post but will expand on this further) The Test Cases in this analogy In a job inte