About

testingReflections.com Is experiencing some issues with textile-formatted posts. This issue is being addressed. Your patience is appreciated.

Navigation

Community

Join the Facebook testingReflections Community

Support testingReflections.com:

why donate?

User login

Today's:

Last viewed:

Browse archives

Syndicate

Graphing your test design, mind mapping and exploratory testing...

Submitted by Antony Marcano on Mon, 09/08/2004 - 17:14. exploratory testing

I happened across this article on using graphing and modelling techniques to design tests while I was researching something else...

What is particularly useful about it is the cheat sheet later on in the document summarising the techniques... It also has a list of tools that factilitate this... I have only skimmed it but it looks like it could be very useful.

I was actually looking to see if anyone had written anything on using Tony Buzan's mind-mapping technique to build an exploratory testing framework... I have used it as a means of rapidly outlining test-plans and figured that it would be useful to develop a mind-map outline from which the exploration can begin and be captured through extending the mind-map... this appears to be mentioned in this other article from compendiumdev... I still need to read it in detail to see how much it addresses it...

Please add a comment if you are aware of other articles on this subject.

» Antony Marcano's blog | login or register to post comments

CMAP -- a free mindmap tool

Submitted by jonbach on Wed, 09/02/2005 - 02:15.

At the recent Workshop for the Teaching of Software Testing this week at the Florida Institute of Technology, a few of us discussed Buzan and some tools to build mind maps, one of which was a free tool called CMAP -- http://cmap.ihmc.us/

I've just returned from the conference, but intend to research this more in pursuit of a paper or article about mindmapping tools to use in rapid test planning and exploratory modeling.

Also see Allen Johnson's paper up on http://www.testingeducation.org/conference/wtst4/4thWorkshoponTeachingSoftwareTesting.html

-- Jon

» login or register to post comments

mind mapping for exploratory testing

Submitted by neill mccarthy on Fri, 31/12/2004 - 17:42.

I am not sure of any published papers on this but is something I was discussing with Jon Bach and Robert Sabourin at StarWest in November 2004 and styles of reporting and recording Sessions in Exploratory Testing and this and Alan Richardson's (principal at compendium developments) use of graphs and state machine models came up as something we all found of interest.
I know Graham Freeburn at Newell and Budge has done two papers at EuroStars (2002 & 2003 from memory) on mindmapping and how he applies this to testing, though he mainly used these for the generation of tests and requirements for preplanned testing )or at least he did then).
I have had the pleasure of working with Alan Richardson on occassion and he has always used these kind of modeling approaches to creation of his tests, in both exploratory and non exploratory frames, now if we could just automate these models (MDA style) as executable state machines...
anyway that's digressing, I am planning a paper on styles of how we can capture information from Session Based Testing sessions ( i think Pat McGee at FIT is working on something similiar about the styles people use for exploratory testing too). So no papers yet but there could be soon.
One last name is James Lyndsay over at Workroom productions, also in the UK, who dispite knowing people in common with, i have yet to meet is probably worth talking to on the subject as he has some excellent papers on Session based exploratory testing on his site from various conferences.