Personas

A test that says "the owner cancels a booking and the guest is told" is a test anybody can read. Personas are what make that sentence possible: a named cast of pretend people, each with their own character, that your checks are written in terms of.

A searchable list of personas filtered by People and System, with a panel on the right showing the selected persona's character and what it is used for.

People and systems

The filter splits the cast in two.

People are the ones with a character — an owner, a guest, an administrator. Each carries a short description of who they are and how they behave, and that description is what your checks refer to.

Systems are the other things that act on your app without being a person: another service calling in, a scheduled job. They have no personality to describe, so they are listed separately rather than padded out with one they do not have.

Where the cast comes from

You do not add personas here. They are defined in your project's settings, alongside the checks that use them, and this screen reads that list. An empty screen means none have been defined yet — the screen says where to add them.

Keeping the cast in one place is the point. When "guest" means the same thing in every check you have written, changing what a guest is changes every check at once.

From a persona to a real run

A persona can be sent to work. Open one and you can hand it to a virtual customer — the same character, but signing in to a running app and using it for real, rather than following a script you wrote.

A persona is a description, not an account. Giving your tests an "administrator" persona does not create an administrator in your app, and does not grant anybody anything.

Where to go next

• Scenarios — the journeys these people are written into.
• Virtual customers — the same cast, turned loose on a running app.
• Users — your app's real people, which is a different list entirely.