Exploratory Testing Tours
A tour is a named strategy for a whole exploratory session, borrowed from a tourist visiting a city: the tester picks one goal, such as “follow the money” or “break things on purpose”, and explores the product with that goal in mind [1]. Where a heuristic suggests the next single input, a tour sets the direction for the whole time box. Tours are used as the resources part of a charter.
1. Six districts
Whittaker compares the product to a city a tourist explores, and groups his tours into six districts [1].
Whittaker’s tourist metaphor: pick a district for its goal, then a tour inside it. The Seedy district is marked red because its tours attack the software on purpose. [1]
2. The tours
Each tour, in one line:
| District | Tour | What the tester does |
|---|---|---|
| Business | Guidebook | follows the user manual and checks the product does what it says |
| Business | Money | exercises the features that sell the product |
| Business | Landmark | visits the key features in many different orders |
| Historical | Bad-Neighborhood | returns to areas where many bugs were found before |
| Historical | Museum | exercises old code nobody has changed for a long time |
| Historical | Prior Version | reruns what worked in the previous release |
| Entertainment | Supporting Actor | tests the features next to the main ones |
| Entertainment | Back Alley | tests the least used features |
| Entertainment | All-Nighter | keeps the application open and data growing for a long time |
| Tourist | Collector’s | tries to make the product produce every output it can |
| Tourist | Lonely Businessman | goes to the feature farthest from where the user starts |
| Tourist | Supermodel | looks only at the interface |
| Hotel | Rained-Out | starts operations and cancels them midway |
| Hotel | Couch Potato | does as little as possible: defaults, empty fields |
| Seedy | Saboteur | takes resources away: files, network, memory |
| Seedy | Antisocial | enters what the software least expects |
| Seedy | Obsessive-Compulsive | repeats the same action again and again |
3. Worked example: two tours on one shop
The following is constructed for illustration. On the coupon system, the Obsessive-Compulsive tour suggests repeating each action: applying the same coupon twice reveals that the discount doubles. On checkout, the Saboteur tour suggests taking resources away: cutting the network just after “Pay” is pressed reveals that the order is charged but not recorded. The same feature, explored under two tours, yields different bugs, which is why a session names its tour in the charter: explore checkout using the Saboteur tour to discover lost or double payments.
When to use it — and when not
Use tours to give a session a clear goal when the tester knows the product a little, and to spread several sessions over different kinds of risk. They do not replace domain knowledge: a tour says where to look, not what the right result is.
Limitations
Tours name strategies, not inputs, so two testers on the same tour still try different things. There is no measure of how well a tour has been “completed”; what was covered is known only from the session report.
How solid is this?
- Where it comes from. Whittaker’s book [1].
- What is contested. No experiment compares tours with each other or with untoured exploration; the catalogue is distilled experience.
- What we do not hold. We have a summary of the book, not its full text; tour names follow the book, and some secondary sources assign tours to different districts.
References
- J. A. Whittaker,Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Test Design. Addison-Wesley, 2009.
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