Scriptable users and structure

Once we’ve tested creating users and accounts through the user interface, we likely don’t need to do it again in the same test run. Yet, we may have complex tests, such as the account permissions example in the previous section, that require a lot of setup. One option is to write automation that isn’t really testing anything, just creating accounts through the user interface. These checks will be brittle, meaning they break easily with small changes in the software. Brittle tests are hard to maintain because they confuse changes that don’t matter with changes that do. This makes the software record a failure when it should not. Fixing the automated check will require re-running to failure, figuring out the new expectations, and changing the code, and running again. This extra work adds to maintenance costs. These checks also tend to be slow, because they actually load a real web page or run an application that connects to the...