Clojurians Log v2

I've got an ongoing big problem that I have to work around, and big surprise, it's related to state---

I write a lot of end-to-end tests: I dig around in the DOM of our application, discovering things I want to grab to click or fill in or select, etc, and adding test-hooks to the code that generates the markup.

So I write code that drives what the state of our application is, and I read to it and write to it as though I were a human user

The most common mistake I make is thinking I'm in one application state when I'm not. So for instance, I have to open up an accordion to get at a button that will open a modal that I want to interact with, and I am not waiting long enough for the accordion animation

that kind of thing

I do have predicates I can call to find out things about the current application state

but I thought I'd ask the #architecture crew if you think there's a strategy I should have in mind for this situation where I have state that I can't remove, cause I'm driving another program around into various states

my first half-baked solution is maybe I should create a model of the states and transitions available in the application, something viewable with graphviz, and use that to think with

@mathpunk to me it sounds that the problem is that your e2e tests derive the application state

it seems a bit upside down

what i would personally do is take a bit of a "declarative" approach

e2e tests require a certain application state as a predicate

then they perform their test

optionally, you can have a separate component, that tries to get the application into the desired state

but this is completely separate from the actual test

the actual test should be just contracts

"provided state is X, if we do Y, then new state becomes Z"

then you can optionally have a completely separate utility that tries to get the application into desired state X

but this is fairly complex and error-prone

i would probably prefer to rebuild application state from scratch in a fixture, if that's possible

i do have separation of the tests from the components that command state

but the methods they have for setting state is that "complex and error prone" bit you're talking about

thank you for your thoughts

have you looked at perhaps using something like https://github.com/reifyhealth/specmonstah ?