Exploratory Testing

Ad-hoc Testing

Unstructured testing without a plan or documented test cases — relies on the tester's experience and intuition. Useful for quick smoke checks and early defect discovery, but not reproducible.

Error Guessing

Designing tests based on the tester's intuition about where defects are likely to occur. Powered by experience and knowledge of common failure modes — null inputs, off-by-one errors, race conditions.

Test Scenario

A higher-level description of what to test — the situation or feature — without the step-by-step details. One scenario typically generates multiple test cases.