... instead I discovered the name
Soap Opera Test has been already invented :-( . Good news is that no one blamed me o sued me for that. I just discovered it googling the term, I've found a 2003 reference in this
article by Brian Marick who credits
Hans Buwalda for term invention, as it can be seen in
this paper.
However the meaning of the term is slightly different. The original meaning refers to a comprehensive test strategy, while I focus on the antipattern perspective. Maybe the emergency of the
Soap Opera Test term is an antipattern itself...
The original term seems to be more about brainstorming for tricky edge cases. I guess that the actual tests that would come out of the process would be short.
ReplyDeleteI like your antipattern a lot and I've mentioned it to other people, having seen it myself....
Hi Chris
ReplyDeleteI like the tricky edge cases, they put some salt in the test activity...
Consider this -real life- case. My wife booked a 2-way flight trip to finland for the whole family, a 2 weeks trip. My younger daughter was eligible for a discount, since she was younger than 2 years. She had a birthday during the trip, so the return ticket was at a different price. The whole ticket included an intermediate stop in Brussels, and was bought on a "booking aggregator" web site... Bologna Brussels was with Brussels Airlines and Brussels to Helsinki with Finnair.
we ended up discovering that name and surname of the daughter were swapped, hence her ticked was not valid and a new one has to be created from scratch... but this happened only on the second part of every flight...
There's some plot in it, but it should end up in few lines to control the test data creation process... or something like FamilyFactoty.createAReallyBorderlineFamily()
But I'll proudly keep on sticking to my naming now ;-)