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by Martin Fowler.
Original Post: Bliki: UserJourneyTest
Feed Title: Martin Fowler's Bliki
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Feed Description: A cross between a blog and wiki of my partly-formed ideas on software development
User-journey tests are a form of BusinessFacingTest, designed
to simulate a typical user's "journey" through the system. Such a
test will typically cover a user's entire interaction the system in
order to achieve some goal. They act as one path in a use case.
They are usually BroadStackTests and as such, are
usually slow to execute and prone to being brittle. Consequently
suites of user journey tests usually aren't built to be
comprehensive tests of a system's behavior. Usually you will have
only a few user journey tests to exercise the integration of the
system as a whole - probably only one path for each use case
(usually the happy path). Verification of all the variations in
behavior is left to tests done in different styles, usually with
more focused coverage.
In contrast to StoryTests, user journey tests are not tied to
user stories. When you play a story you look at the existing user
journey tests and modify them to support any change in behavior
implied by the user story, only rarely does a user story lead to an
entirely new user journey test.