A census of risk
A census of risk is all the things that might go wrong. Some companies break this down into test cases and then describe every step. Another approach is to identify the risk, give it a “charter” or “mission,” assign a timebox of 30 minutes, and allow the tester to explore the product with the intent to decrease risks along that charter.
We are going to disappoint everyone by suggesting neither approach.
The two approaches are not peers. Session-based test management, which includes time-based charters, notes, and debriefings, puts the tester in charge of finding problems. Our experience with paper, documented test cases is that they involve a great deal of typing, and most of the information is incredibly obvious. The parts that are not obvious often grow stale quite quickly. More than that, the test case approach reminds us of the walk through the dog park we took in Chapter 4 – it covers the same input space repeatedly. That...