Different approaches I take to take to testing a product - Part 1 Ad-hoc

As part of testing a product, I take various different approaches for doing the same task. The approach depends on the stage of the product, type of product, time at hand amongst other factors. I thought I'll pen down these approaches along with the reason I use the particular approach and its advantages/disadvantages.


The first kind of testing I ever did was ad-hoc testing. I joined my company with no prior experience/knowledge of testing. My manage asked me to just play with the product and try and find out as much as I could about the product by just trying out different features. He asked me to simply explore the product and write down any questions I might have and also anything that in my opinion was a bug. As a novice, my approach was purely ad-hoc.The only thing that helps me with this approach was my curiosity about the product.I tried the product with a notebook and pencil at hand. I would write the features I could not figure out and things which seemed intuitively wrong.


Over the years, this ad-hoc testing has become a part of my routine and something I try to do on a regular basis with the products I am working on or some other products that my team owns. With time I have realised that if you focus on a particular area, like UI or internationalization, when you are testing in this manner, it increases your chances of finding bugs.  The idea is that while you focus on a particular area, you don't start out with plan. You just try to do different things with the product, some of them do turn out to be far stretched and a fragment of your imagination but that just adds to the fun. The more twisted the thing you try to achieve with the product, the more fun you have. Thats the basic idea about my adhoc testing, fun. It acts as a break from whatever else I was doing/trying to do. And a one hour of just playing with the product, gives more than enough insight and issues to justify the time I spend on it.


I have found more bugs with this ad-hoc testing approach that with the other planned approaches I have used. This has helped me know the health of a new feature faster than going through the test cases and also find test holes during the later part of the product cycle.


I guess this approach is similar to exploratory way of testing, though I don't know enough about exploratory testing to confirm it. Try it out if you don't already do it. Its fun and productive.