Use Soap Opera Testing to Twist Real-Life Stories into Test Ideas

Reality is a great source of inspiration. Real-life situations can present complexities that are not always anticipated—and, as a consequence, not always handled well. Business functional tests should try to present situations that are routed in reality but also aren’t too obvious. Testing and automation pioneer Hans Buwalda came up with a concept for test design called "soap opera testing" based on this concept. It is a style of writing tests where one writes as if they were episodes in an imaginary soap opera on television. Soap opera episodes are based on real life, but usually they are more condensed and somewhat exaggerated, which are great properties for efficient and effective test design. Thinking of test development as writing soap operas can encourage creativity and be more fun. It also paves a way for nontechnical domain experts to contribute. Hans discusses the concept of soap opera testing, describe how these tests could be efficiently written and automated using techniques like keywords, and explain how this all will work in agile and DevOps.