Construction of test titles and instructions text

[jscholes]

Test titles tend to consist of:

1. an action like "navigate forwards to", "read information about";
2. a subject like "a collapsed disclosure button"; and
3. a mode (or nothing for macOS VoiceOver).

This raises two questions. First, how much detail should be included when declaring the subject of the test? For example if navigating to the last option in a listbox popup from a combobox which is editable, expanded and empty in interaction mode, we can end up with a test title like: "Navigate to the last option in a listbox popup from a filled in, editable, expanded combobox in interaction mode". This seems unwieldy and prompts the question, what would we put in the instructions column for the same test?

In other words, where should the split be? We want to maintain distinct test titles, but not have them be overly long and/or negate the utility of the instructions field.

Secondly, it seems redundant to include the "in <mode>" portion in the title itself when we have a mode column in the commands and tests CSVs for that purpose. The test harness could easily append the mode to the title. Although this maybe does imply that some logic about so-called "modeless" ATs will need to be worked out first, to avoid incorrectly associating VoiceOver tests with interaction mode.

If the above seems like something we want to explore further, it may also allow us to promote the "task" column to be the test title. For example:

• Task: "Navigate forwards to a collapsed disclosure button"
• Mode: "reading"
• Final test title as constructed by harness: "Navigate forwards to a collapsed disclosure button in reading mode"

Final thought: there are also opportunities to break this down even further into reusable parts. E.g.:

• Action: "navigate"
• Direction: "forwards"
• Subject: "collapsed disclosure button"
• ... etc.