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Exploratory Testing and Pizza: What Is Common?

It is hard to believe that exploratory testing and the cooking of pizza have much in common. Seemingly, the cuisine and software testing company – no any interrelation.

Except that the testers often eat pizza, it really is. But some kind of analogy between software checking and pizza cooking still takes place. It needs to just remember how people cook pizza and how testers execute the checking procedure by the exploratory method.

Why Does Pizza Cooking Remind Exploratory Testing?

  • Firstly, pizza is cooked based on a recipe, strictly following all items of the instruction.
  • Then people often start to add some other ingredients which were not mentioned in the recipe. Sometimes such tries lead to the delicious new taste of the already familiar dish, and sometimes it is totally terrible. This process may be called “exploratory cookery”.
  • During the experiments with the various product combinations, people already know that some ingredients are better not to mix at all and some of them are enough to add a little. As a result, new dishes become better and better. 

Certainly, when there is one good recipe, the cooking process will be fast and, thereafter, the dish will be tasty. But if to imagine that it needs to cook thousands of pizzas. In this case, each pizza cooking by the instruction will take a lot of time. And one cannot be sure that each of these recipes is initially successful.

In such difficult situation, only the experience in cookery may avoid unpleasant moments. This relates not only pizza or lasagna. The same is relevant also for the different software checking types (white box testing, system checking, ad hoc testing, security control, black box testing or gray box one). The presence of skills, knowledge, and experience will always help to perform software testing qualitatively.