One of the highlights of CAST 2008 was Cem Kaner's talk "The Value of Checklists and the Danger of Scripts: What Legal Training Suggests for Testers."A big part of the talk was the contrast between exploratory and scripted processes, wherein Cem contrasted scripts—canned, step-by-step instructions that are executed more or less automatically, whether by an automaton or a human acting like one—and checklists—sets of things that we might want to consider, where the decision to consider them is under the control of the person using the list. For me, what was most valuable about the the talk was the evolving story of the nature of exploration and exploratory testing. So, as of September 21, 2008, here's a report on my version (as usual, strongly entwined with Cem's and with James Bach's) of the story so far. One goal of this exercise is to be able to point people to this post instead of repeating myself in testing forums.

I was walking back along Charing Cross Road in London yesterday afternoon from a lazy Sunday lunch, when who should I bump into?

Only bloody Scott Ambler! Yes, that Scott Ambler, who lives in Canada.

That particular area - near Cambridge Circus - is a hotspot for such bizarre coincidences, as it happens.

A while ago I answered the following question on SearchSoftwareQuality.com’s Ask The Software Quality Expert: Questions & Answers .I have a hard time getting our programmers to work closely with me. They have a low opinion of the value I can contribute to the project and have little respect for the value of testing in [...]

Stack Overflow is a new community site for answering programming questions. It is very impressive to me, but there seems to be a very Microsoft (.NET, C#, etc) slant to the questions being asked.

It would be great to see more Python questions and answers over there. The one python related question I did ask was answered fabulously... so there are Python-heads reading and answering, but not posting very many questions.

How do you write good parameterized unit tests?
Where do they work the best?
Are there some Test Patterns ? Anti Patterns?

This is the kind of questions that we have received many times from Pex users. We just released Pex 0.7 which contains a list patterns and anti-patterns for parameterized unit testing (this is still a draft but we feel that we already have a number of good patterns that would be helpful for anyone giving a shot at Pex):