Following an unscripted test path, an exploratory session is always good to identify crashes, hangs or less obvious bugs.
The more exploratory testing you do, the better, since your chances of finding a great bug increase. But we don’t really have the time or manpower to do a lot of exploratory testing.
In addition, since testers have to sleep and eat as well, we can’t run uninterrupted test sessions for days on end. Still, maybe you wondered fearfully how your app would handle hours long, even multiple days long of continuous usage.
Enter Monkey, https://github.com/cbalea/monkey. This open source tool was designed to hunt for crashes. It can exert the app under test for a long period of time – in theory, forever – serving as a stress testing tool as well.
Like a monkey, it goes randomly through all of the screens and stops when the app cannot be interacted with anymore, or when the time runs out. This session will present the concept of exploratory testing, why it’s hard to automate and how the Monkey tool solves this problem.
It will include a live demo as well.