Exploratory testing is about making an effective use of our available resources, skills and practical knowledge and about finding as many high severity defects as possible within a certain time limit. It is based on the tester’s skills, knowledge about testing and system at hand, and known testing methods and tools.

Exploratory testing is often integrated in the test strategy together with regular manual testing. As testers, we learn about the system more and more during the project, and additional 'exploratory tests' (or heuristics) should be added continuously to our current manual test cases repository.

However, we may find ourselves sometimes with vague requirements, no specification documents, or asked to test very early while there are no mature documents. We may find ourselves identifying clusters of defects in certain areas, we are concerned about. In these cases and more, Exploratory Testing can be a very effective approach that can assist us in deploying a less risky software or system into production.

Testers, testing team leaders, test managers, developers and development managers that would like to know what is Exploratory Testing, how to plan it, run it, measure it, and improve in doing it.

The objectives of this workshop is to give the participants an overview of

• What is Exploratory Testing?
• When and where to use Exploratory Testing?
• How to run an effective ET session?
• What to measure in an ET session?
• How to manage an ET session?

These questions and more are a part of the challenges we face in implementing ET today, whether it is in incremental models or more recently in iterative models (i.e. Agile).

The workshop emphasizes the implementation of exploratory testing methods and mindset. Through presentation, discussion, debate, brainstorming, questioning, and fun - we shall go through terminology, methodology, concepts and tools and learn how to run ET sessions.

Participants should have basic testing knowledge about testing life cycle, testing techniques and methods, test measurements.

Note: The workshop includes hands-on exercises, and participants are required to have their laptop with them in class including Office 2010 and up, internet connection, and access to their email account.

Mr. Alon Linetzki - is an expert test engineer, testing coach and a testing consultant with over 23 years in testing, and over 33 years in IT. During his career, Mr. Linetzki have participated and managed various types of development projects and testing projects with a large range of technologies, size and sector domain orientation from telecommunication and finance, to banking and embedded systems.

He is the author of multiple testing classes, including: Testing in an Agile Environment, ISTQB® Agile Tester, Exploratory Testing, Measurements and Metrics for Making Good Quality Decisions, Test Process Improvement Using TPI®, Risk Based Testing, Writing Good Test Requirements, and Test Automation for Decision Makers, Introduction to Test Automation, Personal Communication and presentation Skills, Root Cause analysis in Testing and Adding business value increasing ROI in testing, and more.

Mr. Linetzki is a popular speaker in international testing conferences since 1995. He is the co-founder of the Israeli Testing Certification Board (www.itcb.org.il), and the founder and chair of SIGiST Israel (www.sigist.org.il). He is leading the ISTQB® Partner Program worldwide as part of the marketing working group. He is also one of the authors of the new ISTQB® Foundation Level Agile Tester Certification, and is involved in the next level certification of ISTQB® Advanced Level – Agile Technical Tester. Mr. Linetzki is also the ISTQB® Marketing Chair (March 2016).