The Time-Traveler’s Dilemma – State-Driven End to End User Journeys

This chapter addresses a different but common type of test automation – navigating through a survey, page by page, to reach a common endpoint. The challenge here is that decisions made by a user along the way can change the order of the pages displayed downstream – that’s if they appear at all. In this case, we need a fluid user journey that can take many branches to get to a common endpoint, as well as report if a path ended with an error page. It is inefficient to try to create an expanding path of pages for end-to-end automation. The amount of if/then branches or select/case options would be infinite and complex. To solve this, we will explore ways to identify each page by its URL and look at ways to decouple page paths, allowing tests to handle sequential pages in any order with minimal maintenance. Imagine this approach as a ball bouncing randomly through multiple pegs of a giant...