Anne-Marie Charret has posted about her desire to keep test documents when doing Exploratory testing.
On my current project we are delivering in excess of three thousand requirements, and with each requirement spawning up to six test cases, we were simply drowning in a sea of tests.
To try and survive this, and complete the project with my sanity intact, something had to change. There were a lot of changes, however the main change that I instigated was to introduce the option of performing exploratory testing when the requirement was delivered. Documenting the tests as we performed them, instead of a huge up-front planning process. This ensures that we still maintain a record of our test case to requirement traceability
Well did it work? I am happy to say, yes. Instead of spending most of our time in front of Microsoft Team Foundation Server, we spent the time in front of the application finding bugs.