Organized Testing Vs. Exploratory Testing: Finding the Ideal Balance

Ever found yourself in a situation when you wanted to follow an end-to-end test plan but also fancied to test your improvisation prowess? It is normal and even required to follow a pre-conceived and systematic testing approach. However, to ace the game, you can sometimes blend in both systematic and non-systematic approaches to accelerate bug discovery rate and the feedback loop with minimal planning.

The answer is to find the right symmetry between organized and exploratory testing. But to find that balance first, it is necessary to understand the difference between organized (also known as systematic and scripted) testing and exploratory testing:

Understanding organized testing

In organized testing, testers first create an almost exhaustive set of test cases organized in requirements and test scenarios and execute them later.

It is a linear testing procedure in which testers follow premeditated steps and analyze the input against the intended output.

While performing organized testing, there are fewer chances of deviation from the already planned series of test steps. These test steps are usually written in full detail including ‘pre conditions’, ‘detailed steps‘, ‘expected results,’ and ‘post conditions’. Test Case Management Tools help you document these details in an organized repository.

When should you perform organized testing?

Organized testing should be performed perpetually. This should be the default mode of the QA team. Following are the situations when you should definitely not miss it out:

• When testing a high-risk and confidential app, for example, from the healthcare or financial sector.

• When there is enough time and opportunity for careful planning and documentation.

• When test coverage is crucial. This requires proficient testers and test management tools to reach maximum test coverage.

Advantages and disadvantages

See the below table to see the for and against of organized testing:

Understanding exploratory testing

In contrast to organized testing, exploratory testing is a contemporary and context-driven approach in which the test designing and test execution processes are performed in parallel. It is a non-systematic and non-linear approach that allows in-depth software investigation to highlight areas of improvement on the go.

Exploratory testing enables testers to test and verify important product functions without necessarily pursuing a rigorous test plan. It is quite a helpful testing approach in an interactive Agile environment where testers can toy with user stories built on a specific sequence. Testers can add explanatory comments, assertions, and voice memos around crucial requirements and defects spontaneously. This way testers can quickly turn a user story into a self-explanatory test case.

The on-the-fly feedback and annotation allow everyone onboard to participate in exploratory testing – enabling team members to respond and conform to changes – expediting the agile infrastructure.

Precisely, exploratory testing catalyzes documentation, promotes unit testing, improves the user interface, and supports on-the-spot feedback practice among the team.

“Exploratory testing encourages scientific thinking in real-time” — James Bach, Co-founder Context-Driven School of Software Testing

Testers enjoy an opportunity to explore their aptitude and experiment with their skills and knowledge to bring value to the end product.

Exploratory testing is often taken as a disorganized approach, but in reality, it helps in detecting bugs more closely as compared to organized testing. The knowledge obtained from exploratory testing is worthy in creating test scripts in the succeeding stages.

Best to do exploratory testing with test management or a defect management tool such as Kualitee You can log defects and keep associating them with the relevant requirement thoroughly.

When should you perform exploratory testing?

Following are the situations when you should care to perform exploratory testing:

• Suitable when a team member needs to learn about a specific app module and provide quick feedback.
• When you are developing a highly seamless and user-friendly product; basically with exploratory testing, you can play around with the app from a user’s perspective.
• When you are developing a highly seamless and user-friendly product; basically with exploratory testing, you can play around with the app from a user’s perspective.
• When deadlines are stringent and testers do not have much time to streamline test cases to deliver an early iteration.
• When validating and verifying mission-critical and seminal apps, you can perform exploratory testing to avoid any quality crashes. When there are frequent requirement changes and feature additions after every release.
• To effectively implement the organized testing by the end of testing.
• When testers need to acquire detailed app understanding. Advantages and disadvantages
• When testers need to acquire detailed app understanding. Advantages and disadvantages Below you can explore the pros and cons of performing exploratory testing:

Organized testing vs. exploratory testing

After a detailed understanding of organized and exploratory testing let’s compare the two types and see which approach you need to adopt in your next software development project:


We hope the detailed comparison helps you choose the right testing technique in a bid to achieve speed-to-market and more user loyalty!