I think that the
question is wrong itself. The question is what a novice „should”. I do believe that for most of the novices this is not the best way to learn testing art/skills, but it depends on a person. However! To learn testing by following scripts (I mean detailed instructions for manual testing) written by others is even worse, much worse!
Why and how are we are practicing (drilling)
Indeed, to learn doing something one need practice. In my childhood to learn writing I’ve been practicing to write letter a hundred of times. Letter b hundred of times. Well I think so... I don’t really remember it any more.
Anyway, I’ve been doing it with a Latvian alphabet which by the way does not have letters x and y in it. So later in math classes when we used x and y to describe variables or alpha, beta to describe angles – do you think I have any issues with writing? Do you think it would make sense to ask me write x 100 times?
Up-front design keeps you focused
As repeating the same letter again and again keeps you focused on the narrow task – to improve how that particular letter looks like, just the same way absence of a code to test keeps you focused on what you have – requirements and testing techniques. The ultimate goal in practicing letters is writing skill in general, you achieve it by excelling in each one letter.
What could you learn by executing detailed test cases?
A child writing letter a 100 times takes a quite a lot of time. Why can’t we show them 100 letters written by teacher instead? We would save time and paper! Do you believe this is how writing could be learned? How testing could be learned?!
Conclusions
Test Design (before test execution as opposed to exploratory testing techniques) is the best practice I know of to learn to analyze requirements and to use basic testing techniques. Once you learned a skill you don’t need the practice anymore however.
However there are more skills to learn if you want to be good tester. But I think you have to start with techniques and analyze. That’s why I assign experienced testers to do Exploratory Testing, but my reason is not that novices can’t do it… My motivation is to develop good, knowledgeable, skilled, critical thinking testers.
