Freeform Testing

If someone would have asked me about Free form testing 7 years back, I would have proudly listed all the good defects reported by my test, would have emphasized and demanded extra time within a release cycle to accommodate more Freeform test.

My opinion and perspective towards FreeForm test phase have changed significantly. This is how dependency of Freeform may negatively impact your project.

Program delivery date: Most of the time there is limited visibility of what kind of defects would be reported from Freeform and thus release delivery dates cannot be reliably predicted.

Roll over of resources : Resources (especially from Development teams) cannot be rolled over in anticipation of defects from Freeform testing

Relevance of TestPlans: Higher dependency on Freeform makes your Test Plan and subsequent automation(based on Test Plan) less effective. Consider if you have to bring in additional resources or outsource testing to a third party, if Testplans cannot find defects it is impossible to bring in additional resources to speed up execution.

If the # of defects reported from Freeform is high and many of these defects are required to be fixed as well, then it needs some serious effort to understand why Testplans are not able to catch them.

Freeform is required but defects reported from Freeform should be corner scenarios, double or triple failure scenarios, which makes the system robust but should not negatively impact the delivery dates.