I think even with integration tests they should still be treated similarly - at the end of the day you are setting expectations on an output given a certain inp

I think even with integration tests they should still be treated similarly - at the end of the day you are setting expectations on an output given a certain input, there’s just a lot more going on in between. There’s no avoiding it though when you want something end-to-end, or a synthetic test. You’re piling up a whole succession of stateful actions and if you tested them in isolation you would fail to capture bugs that depend on state. In that sense, better to run a ‘signup, authenticate and onboard’ flow in one test instead of breaking it down.