Some people when you say you do exploratory testing immediately think ad-hoc testing. I suppose because there is less emphasis on obvious structure and at the end there is little tangible evidence of testing performed.

But in my view, there's a lot more to exploratory testing than wandering aimlessly through an application looking for bugs.  As well as mentally challenging, it requires a lot of self-discipline.

Here's why you need self discipline:

1) You need self-discipline to test the parts that are not as interesting to you, or not as fun.  It's easy to overlook and 'forget' them when other parts are more appealing.

2) You need self discipline to give each bug the time it deserves before racing off to find new ones. Time to analyze, examine and understand. Only then, can you go and look for new bugs.

3) You need self-discipline to write up bugs when they are found, instead of leaving them until later or when you feel like it.

In my view,  in exploratory testing, as in many other ways of testing,  its the mission and the stakeholder that count and their needs must come first.

What's different is that instead of relying on documents and reports, you need discipline to  make sure you meet those goals.

PAL, which stands for Performance Analysis of Logs, is a free tool for pulling apart Microsoft log files (IIS, MOSS, SQL Server, BizTalk, Exchange, Active Directory) and analyzing them. The tool generates HTML reports based on recommended performance counters and shows when thresholds for those counters have been exceeded. You can also setup your own custom thresholds in the tool.

Fiddler is a Proxy which logs HTTP/HTTPS traffic. You can set breakpoints, change data, and perform event-based scripting. Fiddler is freeware and works with just about any browser.

LiveHTTPHeaders is a Firefox plugin for viewing and manipulating HTTP headers. From the site:

The goal of this project is to adds information about the HTTP headers in two ways:

• First by adding a 'Headers' tab in 'View Page Info' of a web page.


• Second by adding a tool in the 'Tools->Web Development' menu to be able to display http headers in real time (while pages are being downloaded from the Internet.


• Third by letting you edit request headers and replay an URL (beta). Look for the Replay button in the live window!

This project may be of some help for the following:

• Help debugging web application.


• See which kind of web server the remote site is using.


• See the cookies sent by remote site.

I've found it to be handy when creating performance test scripts or when trying to debug a script.

Occasionally, I'll have need to translate text from one language to another for testing purposes. I don't do a lot of internationalization testing, but many sites today have simple text referencing an alternative language (like Spanish in the United States). For simple text conversion, I've found Google Language Tools to be quite useful. It's not going to let you take up that new project in a language you don't speak, but it might get you by in a pinch.