Testing the Unexpected

Ad hoc testing is unstructured, unplanned, unscripted and spontaneous; whereas low- and high-level testing is planned with expected outcomes based on the requirements. When you are executing ad hoc testing, you are finding out the answer to the open ended question “What would happen if”. The various combinations of choices you make on the screen could produce some very interesting results and potential problems with your online business web site. Predicting what a customer will enter or select on your Web site is difficult. I believe the most effective way to ad hoc test is to ask people who have never seen or used your website before to use it and let you know what they find. You will be amazed at what they do and start wondering why anyone would ever do that on an e-commerce site. But it is those things that can potentially break your site and may need to be fixed before launching it.

Unexpected Becomes Reality

In case you still do not believe that people would do out of the normal things on a Web site, some examples came to mind needed to be mentioned. Here are two real-life examples that were never thought about to be tested.

On a company’s internal website, an employee selected View, Source on the browser toolbar, changed the HTML code, saved it and rendered the site unusable from his computer.

A public website had an option to perform a primary and secondary sort on their contacts list. A customer set both sorts to ascending on Last Name and caused the site to produce an error.

Of course, you will never be able to check all of thing different possibilities, but ad-hoc testing is a great way to at least minimize your risk. Sometimes, the unexpected may  be really obvious when it actually happens!

About the Author:

Jen Mercer is a Quality Assurance Engineer with Network Solutions