[Proposal]: Provide test helper utilities

[tay1orjones]

Problem

Currently there are a few problems cropping up within the Carbon ecosystem regarding testing. These surround best practices, code reuse, and stability for consumers.

• There's lots of similar, copied test code between @carbon/react and related projects like @carbon/ibm-products
• Sometimes changes across minor versions break consumer tests
• Querying some Carbon components is challenging and/or overly verbose

Proposal

We write and export a series of abstractions that would help write tests more easily and uniformly within the Carbon codebase, other libraries, and consuming projects. These could include:

• Standardized queries, such as
  • Querying for components by accessible role - e.g. Combobox via role="combobox"
  • Selecting a single datatable cell with a given value
  • ... please suggest any of your ideas in a comment below
• Light interactions, such as
  • Opening a dropdown
  • ... please suggest any of your ideas in a comment below
• Best practices
  • Avoid brittle tests by not using classnames, ids, testids, or xpath for selectors
  • ... please suggest any of your ideas in a comment below

Benefits

Having these test helpers made available would ensure:

• Unify the approach for writing tests against Carbon components
• The way components are tested within the Carbon codebase itself are reusable in other environments
• As components change, the helpers would too, insulating consumers from changes across minors that might otherwise break brittle tests
• Reduce code duplication across Carbon ecosystem libraries
• Reduce code duplication across projects using Carbon that may have already implemented helpers like these

Open questions

• Could we use the existing @carbon/test-utils for this?
• Could the helpers be framework agnostic? or at least live in different sections of the package? @carbon/test-utils/react?
• Would a multi-package approach be preferred? @carbon/test-utils-react, @carbon/test-utils-web-components?
• Should helpers for react environments support anything other than testing-library?
• How can we source information from consumers to make sure what we're providing matches what they have already or would prefer to have?
• Should we establish a working group to help answer these questions?
• ...

[github-actions[bot]]

Thank you for submitting a feature request. Your proposal is open and will soon be triaged by the Carbon team.

If your proposal is accepted and the Carbon team has bandwidth they will take on the issue, or else request you or other volunteers from the community to work on this issue.

[tay1orjones]

Related https://github.com/carbon-design-system/carbon/issues/16243