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Comment by dmuhs | Hacker News Reader

This article gives a nice view for someone who hasn't had that much experience with OSS development like myself. While I'm kinda familiar with CI systems and the concept of coverage, could someone explain to me what the author means by "happy path" in coverage? Is that considered the most used path in standard behaviour?

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> Is that considered the most used path in standard behaviour?

Yes, basically. If you're building an application that allows people to submit a contact form, then the happy path would be something like:

  1. Load form
  2. Verify the correct fields are there
  3. Fill out form with valid data
  4. Submit form
  5. Verify submission went through correctly

The happy path is a minimum viable test to make sure things are working. For completeness, you'd also want to make sure that input is sanitized, invalid input (e.g. non-functional email addresses) causes a form submission to fail, and layout looks correct (e.g. CSS styles applied).

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