thoughts from the test eye

This Tuesday I held a EuroSTAR webinar: Good Testers are Often Lucky – using serendipity in software testing (about how to increase the chances of finding valuable things we weren’t looking for)
Slide notes and recording are available.
I got many good questions, and wanted to answer a few of them here:

How can we advocate for serendipity when managers want to cut costs?

Well, the “small-scale serendipity” actually doesn’t cost anything. It just requires a tester to be ready for unexpected findings, and sometimes spend 20 seconds looking at a second place. The cost appears when investigating important problems, but in that case, I would guess it is worth it (never seeing any problems or doing no testing at all would be the lowest cost…)
I also know that many testing efforts involve running the same types of tests over and over again. When you know these tests won’t find new information, maybe it is time to skip them sometimes and do something rather different?

Do you have issues finding the root of the problem considering you are doing many variations?

If it is a product I know well, I don’t have problems reproducing and isolating. But if it is a rather new product it can be more difficult, but I would rather see these problems and communicate what I know, than not see them at all!
To take more detailed notes than normally, or to use a tool like Problem Steps Recorder (psr on Windows) can help if you expect this to happen.

Is there any common field for automated testing and serendipity?

Yes!
It is easy to think that automation is a computeresque thing without a lot of manual involvement and tinkering with the product. But in my experience, you interact a lot with the product while learning and creating your tests. And I make mistakes that can discover problems with the product’s error handling.
I know this combination of coding and exploratory testing happens a lot, but it is not very elaborated in the literature (but the recent automation paper by Bach/Bolton have good examples on this.)

Another example of automation and serendipity is that you combine human observations while the tests are running. A person can notice patterns or anomalies, or maybe see what the users perception is when the software is occupied with a lot of other things.
Computers are marvellous, but they suck at serendipity.