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How to Leverage Exploratory Testing to Uncover Bugs

Rob Mason
Applause

Development teams so often find themselves rushing to get a release out on time. When it comes time for testing, the software works fine in the lab. But, when it's released, customers report a bunch of bugs. How does this happen? Why weren't the flaws found in QA?

Welcome to defect fatigue, a common issue that occurs when testers execute the same repetitive automated and manual tests and as a result, skip over or miss defects. Testers need to get creative and investigative to find these well-hidden defects before they slip past QA and into the hands of customers.

Be an Investigator and Break Things

The purpose of exploratory testing is to find defects by breaking application functionality using manual and automated techniques without repetition. The "without repetition" piece is key, and the idea is that teams test to break, rather than confirm. Testers should manipulate connectivity, security, configuration settings, and different user navigation, among others. Other techniques include:

■ creating mind maps to find testing areas to investigate

■ forcing the application to function outside the known paths

■ triggering unexpected errors to discover missing error messaging paths

■ exercising back-end processing and third-party software integrations to see what can be interrupted or failed by unexpected user actions

If an application supports different user roles, testing should be done from these different perspectives and with their respective settings. Testers can also utilize existing browser development tools to find errors that are not always visible in the application UI, and to test and edit to see how the application responds.

Consider the People Element

Testers are also people that use applications every day. They should draw on their own personal experiences with typical application defects to try and break functionality. They should also consider the habits and behaviors of the members of the software development team.

As developers and product managers work more with an application over time, they start to develop habits that may influence how they interact with the software. For example, some developers may only develop code on a local machine while others may only do code reviews instead of pre-testing in a test environment. These are work habits that can lead to defects. On the product side, many product managers habitually create user stories and requirements in the same way, unintentionally leaving out a relevant workflow or configuration setting.

Finding hidden defects requires testing against the grain rather than verifying a function performs as expected. It also requires testing all possible paths that customers might take. Crowdtesting can supplement existing techniques by using real people to serve as proxies for customers. They can test for quality, user-experience and functionality outside the lab, and provide instant, useful feedback.

Testing repeatedly only to have bugs unearthed later by customers is a frustrating and potentially costly endeavor. When testers mix existing techniques with creativity and an understanding of human behavior, they will be able to dig deeper to find bugs and friction points that ultimately improve quality and customer experience before release.

Rob Mason is CTO of Applause

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How to Leverage Exploratory Testing to Uncover Bugs

Rob Mason
Applause

Development teams so often find themselves rushing to get a release out on time. When it comes time for testing, the software works fine in the lab. But, when it's released, customers report a bunch of bugs. How does this happen? Why weren't the flaws found in QA?

Welcome to defect fatigue, a common issue that occurs when testers execute the same repetitive automated and manual tests and as a result, skip over or miss defects. Testers need to get creative and investigative to find these well-hidden defects before they slip past QA and into the hands of customers.

Be an Investigator and Break Things

The purpose of exploratory testing is to find defects by breaking application functionality using manual and automated techniques without repetition. The "without repetition" piece is key, and the idea is that teams test to break, rather than confirm. Testers should manipulate connectivity, security, configuration settings, and different user navigation, among others. Other techniques include:

■ creating mind maps to find testing areas to investigate

■ forcing the application to function outside the known paths

■ triggering unexpected errors to discover missing error messaging paths

■ exercising back-end processing and third-party software integrations to see what can be interrupted or failed by unexpected user actions

If an application supports different user roles, testing should be done from these different perspectives and with their respective settings. Testers can also utilize existing browser development tools to find errors that are not always visible in the application UI, and to test and edit to see how the application responds.

Consider the People Element

Testers are also people that use applications every day. They should draw on their own personal experiences with typical application defects to try and break functionality. They should also consider the habits and behaviors of the members of the software development team.

As developers and product managers work more with an application over time, they start to develop habits that may influence how they interact with the software. For example, some developers may only develop code on a local machine while others may only do code reviews instead of pre-testing in a test environment. These are work habits that can lead to defects. On the product side, many product managers habitually create user stories and requirements in the same way, unintentionally leaving out a relevant workflow or configuration setting.

Finding hidden defects requires testing against the grain rather than verifying a function performs as expected. It also requires testing all possible paths that customers might take. Crowdtesting can supplement existing techniques by using real people to serve as proxies for customers. They can test for quality, user-experience and functionality outside the lab, and provide instant, useful feedback.

Testing repeatedly only to have bugs unearthed later by customers is a frustrating and potentially costly endeavor. When testers mix existing techniques with creativity and an understanding of human behavior, they will be able to dig deeper to find bugs and friction points that ultimately improve quality and customer experience before release.

Rob Mason is CTO of Applause

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...