The Visual Regression Testing Service I want
🌱 This post is in the growth phase. It may still be useful as it grows up.
I want a visual regression testing service designed for indie developers, not enterprise.
In 2010, I started a career in what would eventually be called design systems. I did so at a few companies. An e-commerce company, a whitelabel wellness services provider, and a church management software. All became teams large enough to have people dedicated to choosing their own tools and building their own environment.
All that time, I wanted a tool for visual regression testing UI. And in 2018, Chromatic built it. Only problem is that I had to use Storybook. Storybook is… fine. But it’s a lot.
Of course, if you’re privileged enough to build UI for an enterprises, chances are your component library it’s own package and you don’t mind using Storybook as your development environment. I didn’t.
But I would never install it for a “normal project”.
So for the past 2 years, I’ve been low-key fixated on what Storybook looks like… without Storybook. And what the criteria are for a general purpose visual regression testing service would be.
Component Story format
Component Story Format is the crown jewel of Storybook innovation. I see it as the “stories” part of Storybook and what I want everything to work on.
CSF is more convention than anything else.
default
contains a bunch of metadata about the component you’re writing stories for.- every named export is a “story”
- and stories are written in object syntax