tagged by: test categories

On the Diverse And Fantastical Shapes of Testing

There are arguments about whether a testing portfolio should be a pyramid or more like honeycomb. My second biggest issue with this argument is that it's rendered opaque by the fact that it's not clear what people see as the difference between unit and integration tests.

by Martin Fowler

2 Jun 2021

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article

test categories

Broad Stack Test

A broad-stack test is a test that exercises most of the parts of a large application. It's often referred to as an end-to-end test or full-stack test. It lies in contrast to a ComponentTest, which only exercises a well-defined part of a system.

by Martin Fowler

22 Apr 2013

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bliki

test categories

Business Facing Test

A business-facing test is a test that's intended to be used as an aid to communicating with the non-programming members of a development team such as customers, users, business analysts and the like. When automated, they describe the system in domain-oriented terms, ignoring the component architecture of the system itself. Business-facing tests are often used as acceptance criteria, having such tests pass indicates the system provides the functionality that the customer expects.

by Martin Fowler

24 Apr 2013

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bliki

test categories

Component Test

A component test is a test that limits the scope of the exercised software to a portion of the system under test. It is in contrast to a BroadStackTest that's intended to exercise as much of the system as is reasonable.

by Martin Fowler

22 Apr 2013

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bliki

test categories

Contract Test

One of the most common cases of using a TestDouble is when you are communicating with an external service. Typically such services are being maintained by a different team, they may be subject to slow, and unreliable networks, and maybe unreliable themselves. That's why a test double is handy, it stops your own tests from being slow and unreliable. But testing against a double always raises the question of whether the double is indeed an accurate representation of the external service, and what happens if the external service changes its contract?

by Martin Fowler

12 Jan 2011

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bliki

test categories

Integration Test

Integration tests determine if independently developed units of software work correctly when they are connected to each other. The term has become blurred even by the diffuse standards of the software industry, so I've been wary of using it in my writing. In particular, many people assume integration tests are necessarily broad in scope, while they can be more effectively done with a narrower scope.

by Martin Fowler

16 Jan 2018

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test categories

Story Test

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.

by Martin Fowler

24 Apr 2013

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test categories bad things

Subcutaneous Test

I use subcutaneous test to mean a test that operates just under the UI of an application. This is particulary valuable when doing functional testing of an application: when you want to test end-to-end behavior, but it's difficult to test through the UI itself.

by Martin Fowler

14 Feb 2011

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test categories

Threshold Test

A threshold test is a test inserted into a DeploymentPipeline that monitors some measurable phenomenon by comparing the value in the current build against a threshold value. Should the current build's value pass the threshold, the test fails, failing the build.

by Martin Fowler

12 Sep 2013

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test categories

Unit Test

Unit testing is often talked about in software development, and is a term that I've been familiar with during my whole time writing programs. Like most software development terminology, however, it's very ill-defined, and I see confusion can often occur when people think that it's more tightly defined than it actually is.

by Martin Fowler

5 May 2014

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test categories extreme programming

User Journey Test

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 with the system in order to achieve some goal. They act as one path in a use case.

by Martin Fowler

24 Apr 2013

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test categories


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