Somebody I know who was doing some (unscripted) testing spoke of being bored the other day… I have always found boredom to be a sign that something is wrong.

I believe, as has been said by Kaner et al, that testing is a brain-engaged activity. If that is the case, why would I ever be bored?

Borrowing the Smell metaphor… I would say that boredom is a Bad Testing Smell. If it isn’t a bad smell, it is a whiff of an underlying bad-smell for sure.

If on the rare occasion I find that I am bored, I’d ask myself:

1. Am I testing this area more than I need to? (if so, why?)
2. Am I losing concentration because my brain is tired? Do I need a break?
3. Is what I am doing so repetitive that perhaps it should be automated?
4. Is there a better way of testing this feature?

If I answer “yes” to any of these, I know that perhaps I need to do something differently. Whether that is feasible in a given context, might be a different story.

Update 9th July 2010: This applies to scripted testing as much as it does to exploratory testing. Generally, I’ve found that boredom during scripted testing is because we’re asking a human to do something we should be asking a computer to do… The main barrier to this, in my experience, is that it is harder to write the automated tests than to write manual scripted tests… so, I look for ways to make automated tests as easy to write as manual scripted ones. Usually, I can achieve this with a little effort and have found it makes a huge difference.