An exploratory testing charter is a mission statement for your testing. It helps provide structure and guidance so that you can focus your work and record what you find in a constructive way.
How to Write an Exploratory Charter
This is based on “A simple charter template” from Elisabeth Hendrickson’s awesome book Explore It!, Chapter 2, page 67 of 502 (ebook).
Explore (target) With (resources) To discover (information)
- Target: What are you exploring? It could be a feature, a requirement, or a module.
- Resources: What resources will you bring with you? Resources can be anything: a tool, a data set, a technique, a configuration, or perhaps an interdependent feature.
- Information: What kind of information are you hoping to find? Are you characterizing the security, performance, reliability, capability, usability or some other aspect of the system? Are you looking for consistency of design or violations of a standard?
How do charters relate to Session Based Testing?
You can do exploratory charters without using Session Based Test Management. However if you do use SBTM it is a component that precisely and concisely describes what you are looking for in your test session.