Brian Marick has written lately about Exploratory Testing using Ruby. I decided to try this out on a web application using Ruby and the WTR(Web Testing with Ruby) IE Controller. I’m not at the level with Ruby yet where I can test an application using the Ruby Command interpreter like Brian does, but I thought I could write a short script and run it in an Exploratory manner. I decided to automate steps that would be tedious, time consuming and as a result, very much prone to error if run by a human. After a few minutes, I felt I had a script that was testing the application in a way I hadn’t tested manually. I ran it and watched it play back on my monitor.

When I ran it for the first time, the application responded in a strange manner. I had seen this behavior a couple of days previously when testing it manually, but couldn’t repeat it. When I re-ran the script, the behavior occurred again. I edited the script to hone in on the problem area and was able to repeat the problem each time. I edited it again to narrow down the cause, and I talked to the developer about the behavior. He had a suggestion to check a similar action, so I edited the script to try out the developer’s idea. In the end, I probably spent about a half hour on script development.

In a short period of time, I was able to track down a defect using Ruby that I had been trying to replicate manually. I’m confident that I would have spent a much longer time replicating the problem manually, and probably would have narrowed it down much later in the release when I was more familiar with the product. The test script that capitalized on the computer’s strengths over my human abilities run in a “what would happen if” scenario really paid off.