Story Test

24 April 2013

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.