Static vs Dynamic Testing

07th November 2019

It is important to understand the difference between Static User Journeys and SV-Dynamic User Journeys. Static journeys are a generated list of URLs, (an assumption of a likely journey a user will take) although this is a step up from grabbing URLs in isolation, this method still provides problems.

The main issue with testing on a static format is of course that your web site is not static. The site will develop and evolve, causing the static journey to fail on an out of stock item or not identify failures from navigation developments.

For example, due to an update, when clicking MensWear on the home page, real users follow a link to: www.company.com/menswearV2.do and not: www.company.com/menswear.do

If your coders take the common approach of adding the new code in parallel with the old – then both URLs still work! This will cause the journey to report no problems, but the journey is no longer doing what customers do. No real users can ever reach that URL anymore by navigation but your monitoring is doing what it was told blindly following a script and grabbing the URL all the same. The false sense of security from such monitoring is obvious.