To quickly visualize this handshake, here is a diagram:

Here is a simple diagram of the process:

Web server applications

users

The diagram below walks through the social login process from start to finish.

Sign-in process

The above diagram depicts the details of a session creation.

Figure 2: Refreshing an Expired Access Token

Here’s what this flow looks like:

cookie-based authentication goes something like this:

Token-Based Authentication

I’m going to represent tests as sequence diagrams (handily created via plantuml) rather than actually coding them out. For me the diagrams make it easier to talk about what the tests do without getting bogged down by how they do it.

I’m going to add the API Server as an actor to my first test sequence to give some granularity as to what I’m actually testing.

A sequence diagram shows object interactions arranged in time sequence.