Clarifying your charter

When I'm teaching exploratory testing, I find that one of the most difficult things to learn can be chartering. If you're not practiced at moving from the abstract to the specific it can be very difficult. It becomes even more difficult to figure out what will actually fit in your session time box.

Here are some tips for clarifying the purpose of your testing:

• Don't feel like you need to develop all your charters in one sitting or all of them upfront. Be comfortable with charters emerging slowly over time. While you'll need some charters defined upfront so you can get started, often you'll find that you charter-base will fill in as you go.


• Take the time to state the mission (or purpose) of the charter as clearly as possible. Don't say "Test the portal for reporting accuracy" when you can instead say "Test reports X, Y, and Z for errors related to start and end time selection criteria, summing/totally, and rounding." In my experience, the more specific you are, the better your testing will be. If you need to take an extra 30 to 120 seconds to get more specific, take them.


• Similar to the last tip, if you can't tell one mission from another, you've not done a good enough job defining it. If you have charters to "Test feature X," "Stress test feature X," or "Performance test feature X" can you tell me what the differences are between tests? Couldn't some stress tests be a subset of  simple feature testing? Couldn't some performance tests be a subset of stress testing? If you can't compare two missions side-by-side and have clear and distinct test cases come to mind, than you might benefit from spending a little bit more time refining your missions.


• Finally, while you're testing go back and make sure you're mission is still correct. There's two goals here. First, you want to make sure you're on mission. If you need to test for rounding errors in reporting, but you find you just can't stop testing filters and sorting, than create the charter for testing filters and sorting and execute that charter instead. You can always go back to the charter for testing for rounding errors. Second, if you find as you test that you can better clarify your original mission, add that clarity as you go. It will help you when you go back to write new charters. The more clear you can make it, the easier it will be to recall what you actually tested three days later when you're looking back and trying to remember what work you still have in front of you.