In today’s post we will talk about a term known as ad hoc testing. To begin, we must define that this is a type of informal software testing, that is, it is not structured and its objective is to break down the testing process to detect possible failures or errors as soon as possible.

How is it done?

This type of testing is usually an unplanned activity without any documentation or test design techniques. These tests do not follow any structured form and are performed randomly in any part of the application.

What’s your objective?

The main purpose of this test is to find faults by random checking. And in this way to detect defects through a random approach, without documentation, defects will not be assigned to test cases. This means that it is sometimes very difficult to reproduce defects because they have not been assigned test stages or requirements.

When is an ad hoc test performed?

They are usually performed when there is no time for elaborate testing. However, they are also done after the formal test. It is important to note that this type of testing will only be effective if the software tester is familiar with the system they are testing.

Ad hoc test types

Ad hoc testing is done in multiple ways and at any time. There are 3 ways to do it:

• Friend testing: Also known as Friend testing. This type of testing helps testers develop better test cases and the development team can make design changes early. It basically consists of two friends who work to identify faults in the module.
• Pair testing: In this case, each tester is assigned modules, shares ideas, and works on the same machines to find faults. In this case, one of the people can carry out the tests and the other one takes the annotations. When implementing this type of testing, both testers work together to find ways to detect a higher number of defects in the developed application.
• Monkey test: The person doing the test performs it completely randomly. By doing this type of test, many defects can be found that could have been left behind before. It could be said that this type of test has the ultimate goal of breaking the system.

In summary…

Ad hoc tests are an effective way to find problems at runtime. These can be carried out by an experienced tester who knows the system and, furthermore, it is a type of test that does not need to be documented and proves to be profitable and productive.

Have you tried this kind of test? Tell us.

Another article that may be of interest: Custom Software