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# Exploratory Testing: Lessons from Fact Checking
- URL: https://www.workroom-productions.com/exploration-and-fact-checking/
- Published: 2022-02-23T12:24:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-02-13T12:17:58.000Z
- Description: Check familiarity. Look for causes. Look around the cause. Return to what you know.
- Author: James Lyndsay
- Tags: Articles, Exploration

In 2015, [Mike Caulfield](https://hapgood.us) popularised the concepts of web content as stream and garden. You can see more in his [lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckv%5FCjyKyZY&feature=emb%5Flogo) and [post](https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/).

His primary work is in collaborative education, and you might also have chanced upon his [SIFT approach to sorting truth from fiction](https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/). His open-source book [Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers](https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com) won a [MERLOT](https://www.merlot.org/merlot/) award.

In that book, he proposes ‘four moves and a habit’ for people seeking the truth. His instructions connect with me, as an exploratory tester – they remind me of what I do, and exhort me to do it better and to explain it more clearly.

He writes:

> Moves accomplish intermediate goals in the fact-checking process. They are \[strategies\] associated with specific tactics. Here are the four moves this guide will hinge on:  
> **Check for previous work:** Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research.  
> **Go upstream to the source:** Go “upstream” to the source of the claim. Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the information.  
> **Read laterally:** Read laterally.\[1\] Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network.  
> **Circle back:** If you get lost, hit dead ends, or find yourself going down an increasingly confusing rabbit hole, back up and start over knowing what you know now. You’re likely to take a more informed path with different search terms and better decisions.

His ‘habit’, since you ask, is to respond to strong emotions with fact-checking.

When we explore, we're trying to learn. We want the truth, we want it fast, and we want it to be relevant. I imagine that fact checkers have similar motivations.

My thoughts are that I have a similar habit, and that I use similar moves. To put my approaches into Caulfield's terms:

- Habit: **I look out for emotional reactions**: intrigue, bubbling curiosity, amusement, smug satisfaction, surprise, irritation. Those emotions (not an exhaustive set) are telling me something – and I believe that if I listen to them, I'll find out something I don't know. I make this a habit, because if I listen to my emotions and then give my mind something to chew on, I might enhance those deep responses over time – and perhaps that's one way to be a better tester.
- Move: **I check for previous work** – is this something I already know? Has someone else talked about this? I can check the manual, other parts of the system under test, the bug logs, field reports and customer views. I can consider things I'm not testing, and dig into whether they'd provoke a similar reaction.
- Move: **I go upstream** – I try to find out about the data, or the code, or the systems involved. I try to think about the edges of what I'm working with, and whether my reaction is to something that is within a specific part, whether it is to do with an interaction. If there's an inconsistency between what I expect and what I perceive, I wonder whether my reaction is to do with my model in my head, or the system – and if outside my head, and outside anything I can influence, what that means for further time spent exploring.
- Move: **I work laterally** – typically by using diagnostic approaches to judge the causes of what I've found, and also by thinking of the potential impacts and where else similar problems might lurk. I don't follow Caulfield's actions to read what other people say, as I'll have already looked for that earlier and I'm often the first person with specific focus on the problem.
- Move: **I circle back** – I look out for more emotions, here: confusion, rejection, frustration, ennui. Those tell me that I'm stuck. I might circle back by seeking out a rubber duck, by revisiting what I was doing, by putting a flag in my notes that allows me to forget, by re-assessing where I was, by clearing back to the start. I've written about this in [Handholds Framework](https://www.workroom-productions.com/handholds-framework/).

😖

**I published this here in 2022, but published it wrong, and it languished, unfindable.*