Business flow overview

Business flows are a best practice solution for your test data in Tosca Cloud. They turn test case creation into a simple, one-click operation. In this topic, you'll learn about goals and key concepts behind business flows, which will help you better understand your tasks.

Goals

These are the main goals of a business flow: 

  • Bridge the gap between business processes and practical, automated testing. A business flow visualizes user tasks and journeys and provides an actionable framework for creating tests. This leads to better collaboration between stakeholders and a more effective QA process.

  • Make test case creation easier and faster, with less maintenance effort. A business flow allows you to quickly generate a broad range of test cases from the user journeys you define. This leads to better test coverage for meaningful, high-priority scenarios.

Key concepts

Before you get started, let's go through a few key concepts that will help you understand your tasks.

Business flow

A business flow is a visual representation of the activities that users can perform in your application. It gives you a clear view of what users can do and how they move through your application. Within a business flow, you'll define specific paths that a user might take from one activity to another.

Later on, you will use these paths to automatically generate test cases. That way, you can make sure every path through your application works just the way it should.

Activity

An activity is a group of related steps a user performs to complete a specific part of their journey. Think of it as a meaningful action or interaction within your application. For example, opening the application and signing in, entering data on a form, or verifying information on a screen.

Each activity is based on a reusable test step. This reusable test step defines the actual test actions for an activity.

The activities in a business flow visualize all tasks users can perform in your application, and how these tasks are connected.

Click to enlarge: Flow of activities

Path

A path is a specific sequence of activities through your business flow. It connects multiple activities together in the order they might happen in real life.

You can create different paths to represent different test scenarios. For example, one path might cover a typical "happy path" from log-in to checkout, while another might cover a user who enters unsupported data along the way.

The paths in a business flow visualize user journeys and ultimately define your test sequences.

Click to enlarge: Some of the potential paths through these activities

Once you've defined your paths, you generate test cases out of them. These test cases will help you ensure that your application meets all success criteria before you release.

Reusable test step

A reusable test step is a set of test steps. Reusable test steps are designed to be shared, so you only need to maintain them in one place.

Each activity is linked to a reusable test step, which defines the actual test actions that happen in this activity. Since activities can appear in more than one path, reusable test steps allow you to reuse your test actions across multiple user journeys. That way, no matter how many different paths an activity is part of, the underlying logic stays consistent—and your test cases stay reliable.

Workflow

To create business flows and generate test cases out of them, follow these steps:

  1. Create business flows. Everything begins with a blank slate. Also, make sure to check out the best practices in this topic.

  2. Define activities. Specify which tasks users can perform in your application and what exactly happens in them.

  3. Define paths. Specify your test sequences and generate test cases out of them.