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by Martin Fowler.
Original Post: Bliki: StoryTest
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Feed Description: A cross between a blog and wiki of my partly-formed ideas on software development
Story tests are BusinessFacingTests used to describe and verify
the software delivered as part of a UserStory. When a story is
elaborated the team creates several story tests that act as
acceptance criteria for the story. The story tests can be combined
into a regression suite for the software and provide traceability
from the requirements (user stories) to tests and (through execution)
to the behavior of the system. Story tests are usually BroadStackTests.
User stories are popular because they offer a simple
workflow, each story adds new tests to the story test suite.
However story tests often lead to problems. Regularly adding story
tests leads to a large body of tests, often with significant
duplication between them. When behavior needs to change in later
iterations of the project, duplication in tests can take a painful amount
of time to update. Furthermore broad-stack story tests take a long
time to execute, which is why having a lot of them violates the
TestPyramid. As a result many people recommend using just
a few UserJourneyTests together with business-facing
ComponentTests.