Rethinking Functional Tests: A Continuation Tree Approach
2025-03-13
Traditional unit testing often uses a list structure, but this is inefficient for multi-step functional tests, leading to repetitive code. This article proposes a continuation tree approach, organizing test cases into a tree. Each node represents a step, and connections between nodes represent possible user actions. Leveraging database version control, the method creates database copies at each node, avoiding repeated setup and reducing code complexity from O(N²) to O(N). The author demonstrates an Erlang implementation using nested callbacks and highlights advantages like reduced code duplication and easier error localization.