Subcutaneous Test

I use subcutaneous test to mean a test that operates just under the UI of an application. This is particulary valuable when doing functional testing of an application: when you want to test end-to-end behavior, but it's difficult to test through the UI itself.

Subcutaneous testing can avoid difficulties with hard-to-test presentation technologies and usually is much faster than testing through the UI. The big danger is that, unless you are a firm follower of keeping all useful logic out of your UI, subcutaneous testing will leave important behavior out of its test.