Testing without Requirement

I have tested without requirements loads of times. I had no other choice!! I worked for companies whose software applications were older than me. So, how did I go about testing them?

I looked at the login page (the gate way to the old world). I poked around it. I found fields for username and password and a button login. I clicked on the button. Nothing happened. I mean not even an error message. That was my first bug. The username and password fields allowed me to enter more than one thousand alpha numeric characters. Few more bugs.

At this point, I was warned by my experienced colleagues that we do not need to test in those ways because the user

would at most type in 20 characters only. I thought, may be my experienced colleague has a point to it. Maybe I should not spend time on doing basic software testing. I should do real functional testing; I should learn to use the application just like everybody else. Thinking so, I decided to end my test and hit on the button Login button (to finish what I started). The application suddenly closed and instantly took down all the users that were using it too. I crashed the backend. My first reaction was “I am so fired for this”. My next reaction was “Could I log this bug without getting into trouble because it looks kind of critical”.

I found more bugs without referring to a requirement. When I use the requirement, I can certainly get to the places I might not know about. But if I limit myself to testing as per the requirement, I will certainly miss out on exploring the application for what it is and to figure out how better it could further be.