In recent years, exploratory testing has gained credibility as an effective way to find software bugs quickly. But manual exploratory testing is haphazard and slow.

Automated regression tests have been a mainstay of our industry for decades. These computerized tests are fast, but since they merely replay specific test paths, they never find new and interesting bugs.

Computer-aided exploratory testing combines the human intuition with computer horsepower. The tester decides a) what input data to try and b) how to recognize a bug. The computer then uses that information to create and execute massive numbers of tests that are thorough, robust, and flexible.

Computer-aided exploratory testing brings new possibilities and new challenges to our industry. It requires us to re-think how we approach our work as software testers. This session covers the basics of computer-aided exploratory testing including several examples of how we use it to test Bing.

Abstract: Your computer can help you test a wide range of applications, from map routing to search engines to image recognition.

(The talk walks through examples of the many applications that can benefit from exploratory test automation.)

Test engineers are expensive and CPUs are cheap, so it becomes reasonable to move test creation to the shoulders of a test machine army.  And wouldn’t it be nice to have a legion of robots working day and night to make you look good?

(This talk focuses on why and how to generate and execute millions of automated tests.)