How do you track Exploratory Testing in SilkCentral?

Question

According to the marketing materials for SilkCentral, they support tracking your exploratory testing. I can find nothing to support this claim. I have done the following:

• Searched their help files
• Searched their knowledge base
• Tweeted to MicroFocus
• Googled for "exploratory testing SilkCentral" (which points to their marketing materials and a lot of resumes that have those keywords)
• Searched the SilkCentral community forums (having trouble registering to ask the question there)

Certainly someone must know something about it, but I am not finding anything beyond the claim.

Answer 1

The only way I can figure how to do proper Exploratory Testing with SilkCentral is to:

1. Open application and SilkTest
2. Create window definitions in SilkTest and start Recording.
3. Perform exploratory testing and when completed stop the recording.
4. Edit Recorded TestCase (because there will be errors), and upload TestCase to SilkCentral Test Manager.

Now you'll have the test case saved, so if any bugs were actually uncovered, you can retest again by re-running the test.

Other than this, I can't really see any other way that the application aids in this type of testing (because every other Quality Suite could claim the same).

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

We use SCTM and we use exploratory testing a lot.

We use SCTM to track the areas we've tested by creating manual test cases that are really no more than a brief description of the area/function that we intend to test. Sometimes we also refer to charters when we use SBTM.

We then use SCTM to track the execution of these exploratory tests — works well for us, and we clearly see more potential in this going forward.