[hitchstory]

It works for user facing documentation too. There are actually pretty good reasons for this - e.g. you can use the test to autogenerate up to date screenshots with playwright to put in the documentation.

I'm pretty convinced that there should be a single source of truth for specifications, tests and documentation but I think the industry will take a while to catch up to this idea.

I built a testing library centered around this (same as my username) but it's hard to get people to stop writing unit tests :)

[simonw]

I actually built my own Playwright screenshotting software with this idea in mind too: https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ - I wrote about using that for my project documentation here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/14/automating-screenshots...

Really it comes down to the team you are working with. If you have user-facing documentation authors who are happy with Markdown and Git you can probably get this to work.

[hitchstory]

That's very cool.

I think screenshotting needs to be integrated into the tests though - if a scenario involves a wizard or something, the latter screenshots will be dependent upon the actions in earlier steps.

[simonw]

The thing I really want is automated short video demos, but I've not found a good path to those yet.

[hitchstory]

The skeleton test-generating-docs example I built to exhibit the framework actually does this. Here's an example:

https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory/blob/master/examples/...

It records a video while running the test and then at the end runs it through FFMPEG to make a smaller, slowed down GIF that can be embedded in the autogenerated docs.

It's quite rudimentary though. I've been meaning to try making something more sophisticated and even potentially do additional automated video editing to inject text from the steps or something.