Thoughts on creating Shiny app validation reports?

[LDSamson]

This is not an issue but rather a question.

I am developing a Shiny application that needs to be validated and I am using BDD unit-testing following the recommendations in your online book. For me personally, a section about how to create validation reports for shiny applications would be great addition for the book and if you would ever find the time to include that, I think it would be more than helpful.

For example, is it possible to extract the descriptive text in the unit tests and the outcome of the tests into a validation report (HTML or PDF)? I am aware of the valtools package, but I am not sure if that is compatible with this workflow. I would love to hear your opinion about that. Do you have any thoughts on how this can be done, or any recommendations?

[mjfrigaard]

I think this is a great idea! In fact, I'm trying to design a package (pickler) that's similar to valtools (and covtracer). In essence, pickler will scan the tests in tests/testthat/ that use describe() and it() and compile them into a markdown report. The goal is to generate a FEATURES.md file (similar to the README file covrpage creates) that will store the features (in describe()) and scenarios (in it()).

From the pickler package documentation:

"Behavior-driven development (BDD) starts with a clearly defined business goal (or goals). Developers will collaborate with users to ensure each feature is aligned with a goal (i.e., in each describe() call) and is captured in a plain-language, real-life scenario. Scenarios are used to write tests to verify the feature behaves as expected, creating up-to-date documentation on how the software works (and what it can do).

pickler automates this process by compiling the features (in describe()), scenarios (in it() and test_that()), and expectations (expect_*() functions) into a FEATURE.md markdown report."

[LDSamson]

This sound really great and sounds like what I am actually looking for. Do you have an example of how to create such a FEATURE.md report? I could not find it in the documentation, I probably overlooked it. Is there a specific function that does this?