Best Practices

Provide a Functioning URL or App Source

When creating an exploratory run, check that your URL or app source works in the Rainforest VMs. You can do this by creating a quick test and previewing it in a VM. The tester team treats this URL as a starting point. To whitelist the Rainforest IP addresses, see Which IP Addresses Do Rainforest Tests Come From?

Provide Working Credentials

Sometimes, it’s necessary to provide testers with authentication credentials to access the environment. For some sites, this involves keying in the information when navigating to the testing site. For others, you can reach the testing site without any credentials, but the areas of testing are gated. In this case, the tester logs in as a specific user into a predefined state.

Organize Your Exploratory Test Cases

As exploratory is run more and more, the number of generated test cases grows. Below, we’ve shared best practices for how to manage bug-finding test cases after they’ve been logged.

Run the Folder of Newly Documented Tests

One of the easiest ways to manage newly documented bug-finding test cases is to run these tests to verify the bugs. Since test cases are written with the expected result in mind, the entire group of tests should fail with verification of each documented bug. If your run failure integrations are in place, your team is notified automatically and can begin the bug triaging process seamlessly.

Set Priority Levels for the Bugs

When bugs are identified, change the priority of the tests to allow the results to be communicated efficiently across your team. By determining which bugs are more critical than others, you provide your team with an order to follow when they address the bugs found by exploratory testing.

Incorporate Critical Bug Flows into the Regular Regression Suite

Add critical test cases to run as part of your regular regression. Since these test cases are written with the expected result in mind, you can run them to ensure such critical bugs do not recur.

Tag Tests with the Name of the Tested Feature

Tagging exploratory-generated test cases with the feature’s name is a simple way to bridge the gap between bug-finding and test-creation runs. Moreover, feature name tags can be used to organize these tests in a Saved Filter devoted to the feature, making it easy to test out a feature in Rainforest.

If you have any questions, reach out to us at [email protected].