Business Workflow

A Business Workflow represents a sequence of business operations. For example, to describe the task of transferring funds from one account to another,you could author a workflow that could look something like this:

Transfer funds:

• Check if the current balance is "10000"
• Transfer an amount of "1000" to account "0123456"
• Check that the new balance is "9000"

It is also possible to write the same business workflow as follows:

Transfer funds:

• Click link "My Account"
• Verify field "_act_bal" has value "10000"
• Click link "Transfer Funds"
• Type field "_xfer" value "1000"
• Type field "_dest_act" value "0123456"
• Click button "submit"
• Click link "My Account"
• Verify field "_act_bal" has value "9000"

Though both these examples could be used to test an application, the second example has several issues that are best avoided:

• The scenario cannot be easily understood. It requires a detailed understanding of the interface to figure out what is going on.
• The scenario will have to be modified whenever the user interface changes. This leads to brittle tests that will need a lot of maintenance.
• The individual workflow step are at too low-level to be used meaningfully across other scenarios. They do not convey any business intent.
• In essence the imperative style used in the second example does not convey the business intent, it also makes reuse and maintenance of the test suite difficult.
• Remember a Scenario should represent an end user’s expectation of the behavior of the application.