Exploratory Testing: Finding the Music of Software Investigation is an article that explains exploratory testing using music as an analogy.

I first wrote this article over a year ago as an introductory article on exploratory testing. I wrote it with a technical audience who may never have heard of exploratory testing in mind. When one of my programmer friends exclaimed: “I get what exploratory testing is now!” I knew it was time to stop tweaking it. It has languished in my article drafts folder for months, so I decided to publish it myself.

I hope you enjoy it.

UPDATE: In the spirit of the article, and the work that I do, there are reports of the PDF not loading when using an older version of FireFox, with an older version of Adobe Reader. I tested it with Safari, Opera, FireFox and IE 7 with Adobe Reader 8. I get application errors on file load when using FireFox 1.5 and Adobe 6. If you have problems, use “File/Open” within the PDF reader FireFox plugin, which seems to work. That’s the workaround, I’m working on a fix. 🙂