I took part in my first “Ask Me Anything” session on 22nd March, answering questions on the topic of “Exploratory Testing” as part of the AMA series organized by The Test Tribe.
Presenting an AMA was a different experience in terms of preparation compared to a more traditional slide-driven talk. I didn’t need to prepare very much, although I made sure to refamiliarize myself with the ET definitions I make use of and some of the most helpful resources so they’d all be front of mind if and when I needed them to answer questions arising during the AMA.
The live event was run using Airmeet.com and I successfully connected about ten minutes before the start of the AMA. The system was easy to use and it was good to spend a few minutes chatting with my host, Sandeep Garg, to go over the nuts and bolts of how the session would be facilitated.
We kicked off a few minutes after the scheduled start time and Sandeep opened with a couple of questions while the attendees started to submit their questions into Airmeet.
The audience provided lots of great questions and we managed to get through them all, in just over an hour. I appreciated the wide-ranging questions which demonstrated a spectrum of existing understanding about exploratory testing. There is so much poor quality content on this topic that it’s unsurprising many testers are confused. I hope my small contribution via this AMA helped to dispel some myths around exploratory testing and inspired some testers to take it more seriously and start to see the benefits of more exploratory approaches in their day-to-day testing work.
Thanks to The Test Tribe for organizing and promoting this AMA, giving me my first opportunity of presenting in this format. Thanks also to the participants for their many questions, I hope I provided useful responses based on my experience of adopting an exploratory approach to testing over the last 15 years or so!
The full “Ask Me Anything” session can be viewed on The Test Tribe’s YouTube channel:
Rockin' and Testing All Over The World 