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testingcodeceptionacceptance-testing

What to do when an acceptance test has varying user choices and you want to test each of them

I'm writing some acceptance tests for a donation form. I'm using Codeception. For the sake of this example, lets say that the donation form has 3 parts:

  1. Enter your personal information
  2. Enter either Credit Card and Direct Transfer
  3. Submit and receive e-mail confirmation

For the acceptance test I'd like to test the whole process--for both credit card AND direct transfer. Steps 1 and 3 are essentially the same between the two donation processes, but--obviously--you can't run the second step by itself (the donation form wouldn't submit without step 1).

So I'm wondering, would it be "normal" in this case to write two tests (e.g. canDonateWithCreditCard() and canDonateWithDirectTransfer()) that both test all three parts of the process? Even though that's partly testing the same thing twice?

If not, what would be the preferred way to do it?

Solution

  • This is perfectly acceptable at my work we have a sizable automation suite where the same pages get executed multiple times, because of scenarios similar to what you outlined above.

    The only caveat I would mention is when building your tests (I don't know how codeception works) but look to build your tests using something along the lines of the page object model (http://martinfowler.com/bliki/PageObject.html) this will mean even though you have multiple tests that may implement the same scenarios each test doesn't have its own implementation of those steps.