The kick-drum of the TDD rhythm is Red, Green, Refactor.

At its core, it is just a tight loop of writing a failed test, writing code to make it pass, then make it better without (silent) breakage due to the test.

On this week’s Writing Excuses they used the term Discover, Decision, Action and it dawned on me that is the rhythym of exploratory testing.

  • Discover – Something happened! How did we notice it? Using our senses and trained intuition to reference our catalog of heuristics
  • Decide – Does our new Discovery matter? Alter what we are doing? Change our tactic choice or course? Lead us further into the rabbit hole or out of the brambles entirely?
  • Action – Once we have come to a Decision (or number of Decisions) we act on one, some or all of them. This action causes us to return to the Discovery state.

And the process continues until we decide to take a ‘Stop Testing’ Action and pop out of the loop.

(Now all I need is a nice graphic showing this cycle and we’re off to the races)