Journeys
3 min read
A journey is an ordered walk through the map that accomplishes something real:
A new customer lands, signs up, creates a project and adds their first test case.
This is the one thing Atlas can express that no other surface in Hawzu can. A folder tree says how tests are filed. A requirement says what was asked for. An execution says what ran. None of them can say what a person is trying to get done — which is the thing that actually breaks, and the thing a release owner worries about.
Create a Journey
Section titled “Create a Journey”-
Open Journeys in the action rail.
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Select the action to add a journey and give it a name — name it after what a person is trying to do, not after the screens involved.
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Optionally set a persona:
new customer,admin,API client. This is free text, and it feeds AI generation as context, where a real phrase beats a category. -
Add steps in order by picking nodes from the map.
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Set the journey’s criticality.
Selecting a step pans the map to that node, so a journey doubles as a way to navigate a large map.
Criticality
Section titled “Criticality”| Level | Use for |
|---|---|
| Critical | Paths where a break means the product is unusable — sign-up, checkout, login |
| Important | Paths that matter but have a workaround |
| Routine | Everything else worth naming |
There are three levels rather than a one-to-five scale on purpose. A scale invites argument about the middle, and nobody acts differently on a 3 versus a 4.
Criticality ranks impact analysis results and colours coverage, so it earns its keep beyond documentation.
Steps Are Nodes, Not Routes
Section titled “Steps Are Nodes, Not Routes”A journey step points at a node. The route you happened to take between two steps is an optional annotation.
Two consequences worth knowing:
- Deleting a navigation route does not silently shorten a journey.
- A journey can hold a step with no route drawn yet — “and then somehow they land on the receipt page” — which is often exactly the gap you want recorded.
Journey Health Is Weakest-Link
Section titled “Journey Health Is Weakest-Link”A journey’s health is the health of its worst step, not the average.
The journeys panel summarises this at the top: how many journeys exist, how many need attention, and how many have broken steps.
A broken step is one whose node has been deleted. The journey survives with a gap in it, so you can see what happened rather than having the journey quietly change shape.
What to Name a Journey
Section titled “What to Name a Journey”Good journeys are the paths whose failure would make you stop a release.
- Sign-up to first successful action
- Checkout, end to end, including the failure branches
- Password reset
- The main admin setup path a new customer walks once
- Any path that crosses a system boundary
Journeys that mirror a single screen or a single feature are usually better modelled as nodes. The value of a journey is that it crosses things.
Journeys Feed Generation
Section titled “Journeys Feed Generation”A journey can be handed to the AI test case generator as context. Atlas supplies the ordered path and the shape of the product around it, which is the part no other surface can provide. See Generate test cases from Atlas.