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by sktrdie 1740 days ago
I think what most developers use Storybook for is development in isolation which is essentially what TDD is about.

In fact what we end up doing with Storybook is that we create the "stories" (literally .stories.ts files) that renders each component with a specific permutation of props. However this is pretty much a copy of the .test.ts file we write for the component itself - so many times it's literally doing pretty much the same stuff.

I find it so weird that in 2021 we don't have a way to just render our test files (which essentially is using some server-side dom abstraction) also to a browser so we can view the component and develop against it.

Then we wouldn't need storybook or story files that describe how a component is rendered - that's the test file responsibility.
2 comments
jabbawookiees 1739 days ago
Have you heard of the storyshots addon? I pretty much ignore its output but I've found it a useful sanity check to see that everything at least renders without errors without any additional effort. I no longer make simple render tests when a story suffices.

https://github.com/storybookjs/storybook/tree/main/addons/st...

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DerJacques 1740 days ago
Have you looked into Cypress (https://www.cypress.io/)? If I understand you correctly, it may actually do what you are describing here.
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stepbeek 1740 days ago
The combination of cypress and something like percy (https://percy.io/) has made me completely lose interest in testing components independently. The components that make up a UI are an implementation concern that I don't really care about testing independently.

I can write automated tests to verify that a component in a relevant context still functions, and can have a check at PR time to verify that the UI hasn't changed unexpectedly.

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sktrdie 1739 days ago
Yes cool but I want to be able to run the test in command line like I currently do with Jest where everything is mocked (even DOM) so it runs super fast (during CI) but then I also just wanna run the test in a browser for my development workflow.

Running all tests in Cypress would result in slow CIs.

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