Scenario-Based Testing
Scenario-based testing designs test cases around realistic, end-to-end user scenarios — a customer buying a gift for someone else, a support agent processing a return — rather than testing individual features in isolation. It aims to reveal issues that only surface when a real workflow spans multiple features together.
Feature-by-feature testing can miss the gaps between features — each one works correctly on its own, but the combined journey a real user actually takes reveals friction or bugs that no single-feature test case would catch, because no single-feature test case crosses that boundary.
Good scenarios come from real usage data, support tickets, or user research, not just brainstorming in a vacuum — the goal is testing the paths users actually take, including the messy, non-linear ones, not just the clean, idealized happy path a spec might describe.
