While reading Duncan Nisbet’s TDD For Testers article, I stumbled on a neat term he used, “follow-on journey”.

For me, the follow-on journey is a test idea trigger for something I otherwise would have just called regression testing.  I guess “Follow-on journey” would fall under the umbrella of regression testing but it’s more specific and helps me quickly consider the next best tests I might execute.

Here is a generic example:

Your e-commerce product-under-test has a new interface that allows users to enter sales items into inventory by scanning their barcode.  Detailed specs provide us with lots of business logic that must take place to populate each sales item upon scanning its barcode.  After testing the new sales item input process, we should consider testing the follow-on journey; what happens if we order sales items ingested via the new barcode scanner?

I used said term to communicate test planning with another tester earlier today.  The mental image of an affected object’s potential journeys helped us leap to some cool tests.