I had a discussion with someone new I met who talked about having worked on state machine for a dog poo game where the dog poos and you have to pick it up.

 

It came to me that this is a good way to explain what exploratory testing is.  Part of exploratory testing revolves around knowing states.  Pre and post conditions…

 

What you’re trying to explore is the current state machine of the software you are trying to test and seeing if it matches with what the design of the software is suppose to be like.  ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine )

 

If it doesn’t match, there may be a bug or a change of design which has to be investigated.