exploratory-testing

exploratory-testing is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from petrkindlmann/qa-skills. It costs 152 tokens per session (4,346 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for investigating software by exploring it without following only prewritten test cases. It uses focused test sessions, called session-based test management (SBTM), with a goal or charter and structured notes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find requirement gaps, discover unexpected behavior after changes, investigate issues such as intermittent slowness, record reproducible findings, and turn useful discoveries into automated tests.
Why use it?
Exploration can become random and its findings can be difficult to reproduce or turn into follow-up work. This gives testers a way to investigate new features, regressions, and vague bug reports systematically.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to find requirement gaps, discover unexpected behavior after changes, investigate…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/petrkindlmann/qa-skills/exploratory-testing
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add petrkindlmann/qa-skills --skill exploratory-testing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/petrkindlmann/qa-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for exploratory-testing

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/petrkindlmann/qa-skills/exploratory-testing.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/petrkindlmann/qa-skills/exploratory-testing)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/petrkindlmann/qa-skills/exploratory-testing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/petrkindlmann/qa-skills/exploratory-testing.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 152 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,346 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00152 $0.04346
Opus 5 $0.00076 $0.02173
Sonnet 5 $0.00030 $0.00869
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00435

Measured 7d ago against content hash c0dd7d003ef4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

exploratory-testing scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/exploratory-testing/SKILL.md · 314 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 314 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.


Quick Route

Match the situation to a charter pattern and the reference section to open.

Situation Charter pattern Open in references
New feature — learn it, find requirement gaps "Explore [feature] with various roles/data to discover requirement gaps and unexpected behaviors" Charter examples + session flow in session-templates.md; boundary/"what if" banks in heuristics-and-automation.md
Regression — a change just landed "Explore [area] after [change] to discover regressions at integration points" State-transition heuristics in heuristics-and-automation.md
Bug investigation — vague report ("sometimes slow") "Explore [area] with [reported conditions] to discover exact reproduction steps" Session flow + session-log template in session-templates.md; error-handling heuristics in heuristics-and-automation.md

Full time splits for each row are in Session Planning by Context below.


Discovery Questions

Before designing a session, gather context. Check .agents/qa-project-context.md first -- if it exists, use it as the foundation and skip questions already answered there.

Target Area

  • What feature, module, or flow is the exploration target?
  • Is this a new feature (discovery mode) or existing feature (regression mode)?
  • What is the most recent change to this area?
  • Are there known risk areas or previous bug clusters here? (See risk-based-testing for risk data.)

Hypotheses and Suspicions

  • What do you think might break? (Hunches are valid starting points.)
  • What did the developer say was tricky or uncertain?
  • Are there areas the automated suite does not cover?
  • Have users reported issues in this area before?

Read the full file on GitHub · 314 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 314 lines · 152 tokens per session scan A c0dd7d003ef4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

exploratory-testing is a skill published in the GitHub repository petrkindlmann/qa-skills (110 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 152 tokens to every session and 4,346 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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