Scenario testing is the new word for it and I think this is a game changer.
Two of the reasons I never liked writing tests is
- they didn’t seem to usually assert much internal logic
- they would have to be maintained along with the original code
I think scenario testing is much better instead because the actual way a person uses a feature hardly changes but the internals might change a lot.
So imagine I’m making an e-commerce website. There are lots of internal mechanisms. I’ll have an agent testing all the functionalities as if it were a customer. This gives me much much more confidence while writing code because it is more uncorellated with the code.
Tomorrow I can change a lot of internals but the testing agent stays the same.
There’s something to note though: not all code is possible to be scenario tested. Like data engineering and other things where the feedback time is huge.
are we just re-inventing playwright tests except 10x slower and infinity times more expensive?
i feel like im going insane
since the rise of agentic coding tools, it feels like we're in a new "eternal september" of people discovering ui end-to-end test automation.
Also the merits of documentation and specs. It’s been eye-opening to see the subset of developers who were almost disdainful about writing documentation for their colleagues but are now tripping over themselves to do so for their clanker.
Clanker is the new excuse to use hard R against something you don't like.
People are rediscovering everything. Some people have proposed using a more formal language to tell the AI precisely what code to write. That's a compiler.
So, throw out the traditional test pyramid, shift right, and rely more on persona testing than fine-grained atomic tests? I would hope teams don't need to re-learn that lesson for themselves, but...
>Scenario testing is the new word
How is scenario different from a behavior (as in Behavior-Driven Development)?
Gherkin and things like Cucumber are not something new, are they?
> Two of the reasons I never liked writing tests
Are you an engineer ? You must test your "creation". Or would you expect that the microwave owen you just bougth will be tested by your child while getting burned ?
'I never liked writing tests' is not the same as 'I don't write tests'.