Ad-hoc testing

It is always not possible to follow proper testing such as writing Test Plan and writing Test cases.

In some cases we may need to go with adHoc Testing. because of time constraint or resource constraint.

AdHoc Testing is the part of Exploratory testing.

It is done without doing Planning and Documentation.

Adhoc testing will help to find the defects earlier. We know that earlier a defect is found the cheaper it is to fix it.

Here am list some tips for doing adhoc testing effectively.

• In case of UI (User Interface) testing, test all navigation including Back button navigation. Go thro' all the pages of the application to find any broken links and also make sure that each and every page is having proper links to reach other pages either directly or indirectly.
• Check whether all the images are having alt attribute
• See the the application screen or webpage by changing/setting different screen resolution in your computer monitor
• Test the webpage in many different web browsers such as Internet Explorer, FireFox, chrome, safari, etc.
• Test the tab order and default focus in all the pages
• Try to enter/save test data having special characters such as single quotes, double quotes and comma
• You can try to enter text with HTML tags such as < and > also in the textbox
• Try to load a authenticated webpage directly by entering url in the browser without doing login
• Try all the possibilities of boundary values such entering lot of data in textbox and entering negative values in numeric fields.
• Remember to navigate the application from two different machines/browsers simultaneously, especially concentrate to test concurrent database saving/updating operation.
• If possible/necessary, test the application in different OS (Operating System)
• If your webpage uses flash files, try to see the behavior of your webpage when it is loaded in a machine which is not having flash player.
• Instead of testing everything from your local machine, just try to test some screens by hosting your site in some remote machine. It will help to identify unexpected issues which may occur due to network latency.
• Test Session timeout, Cookie expiry and script execution timeout.
• Try to refresh your confirmation screen many times to verify whether the multiple refresh saves/inserts the data multiple times.
• Test with different Date and Time format if you webpage/application has date and time entry fields. And, think about Time zone also.
• Make sure that Number/Currency/Name format is correctly displayed in all pages uniformly.
• When testing edit/modify/update feature, modify values of all fields and make sure that everything is getting updated correctly.
• Whenever testing Delete feature make sure that all the related data also getting deleted. For example, when deleting question and answers also will be deleted. And, make sure that necessary constraints are enforced correctly. For example, deletion of questions should not be allowed if the questions are already used in some other modules.