What is Documenté?

Documenté is a literate testing framework that allows you to generate automated tests from user documentation.

It integrates into test frameworks such as Cypress or Playwright, and builds on concepts from Behaviour-Driven-Development and literate programming.

Why Documenté?

Automated testing is a key component of modern software development. It allows to ensure that the software behaves as expected and to detect regressions.

However, writing and maintaining automated tests can be a tedious and time-consuming task. This is especially true for end-to-end tests, which are often written in a way that is not very readable and not very maintainable.

Documenté aims to solve this problem by providing a framework that allows to write automated tests in an almost natural language called Phrasé, using a syntax that is very close to the one used in BDD (Behaviour-Driven-Development).

Tests written with Phrasé are meant to be included in the documentation of the application. This allows to keep the documentation and the tests in sync, and to make the tests more accessible to non-technical people.

Regressions are easier to detect, as the tests are written in a way that is closer to the way the application is used.

Specification issues are also easier to spot and fix, as they are located in the same place as the tests.

Getting started

Prerequisites

Documenté integrates into projects with a end-to-end testing framework installed. You can refer to Cypress or Playwright installation instructions to get started.

Installation

Install Documenté as a dev dependency:

yarn add --dev @documente/documente

Or with npm:

npm install --save-dev @documente/documente

You can also install Documenté globally:

npm install --global @documente/documente

Configuration

Create a documente.config.yml file at the root of your project:

runner: playwright                  # either "playwright" or "cypress"
input: docs/**/*.md                 # location of documentation to extract tests from
outputDir: tests                    # directory in which tests should be generated
selectors: documente/selectors.yaml # path to selectors file

Describing your application with a selectors file

Documenté expects a YAML file with a tree-like representation of your application.

Here is an example selectors file, describing a login form containing a login field, a password field and a confirm button, as well as error and welcome message containers.

Documenté uses the standard HTML5 selectors which allow you to locate HTML elements by type, class, ID, attribute...

login form:
  _selector: .login-form
  login field: input[type="text"]
  password field: input[type="password"]
  confirm button: button[type="submit"]
login error message: .error-message
welcome message: .welcome-message

Writing specifications

Specifications are written in Markdown files, using the Phrasé syntax.

Here is an example of a specification file:

# How to use my awesome application

Login into the application to be greeted by a cool welcome message.

```phrase
when I login
then welcome message should be visible
and it should have text "Welcome, user01!"
```

In order to login, simply type your username and password in the login form and click on the login button.

```phrase
In order to login:
- I type "user01" on login form login field
- I type "password" on password field
- I click on login form confirm button
```

You can place the specifications in any folder you want, as long as you specify the correct path in the input property of the documente.config.yml file. A good practice is to place the specifications in a docs folder at the root of your project.

Take a look at the Phrasé repository for more information about the test syntax.

The example project will also give you a good idea of how to write specifications.

Extracting the specifications

To extract the specifications from the documentation files, run documente from the root of your project:

documente

This will generate test files in the output folder.

Running the tests

You can run the tests just like you would run other Cypress or Playwright tests.

With Cypress:

cypress open

Or with Playwright:

playwright test --ui

Example project

You can find an example repository here with a simple application and a set of specifications.

Contributing

Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

For suggestions and improvements, feel free to fork the repo and create a pull request. You can also simply open an issue with the tag "enhancement".

Don't forget to give the project a star! Thanks again!

License

Distributed under the GNU GPL3 License.

See LICENSE for more information.

Contact

Pierre-Clément KERNEIS - [email protected]

Project Link: https://github.com/documente/documente