Testing Backend Copy Changes with Playwright

Hello all 👋 .

For as long as I can remember at my current workplace we've struggled with making test assertions against copy changes that are dictated by a Backend Team.

Since Frontend and Backend teams are disjointed, its very easy for Backend teams to make copy updates without notifying Frontend. This leads to rollbacks at work which are pretty noisey and distract us from getting actual work done.

The reason i'm asking this question is because we've talked about moving towards making assertions against just test-ids instead of copy but there are good arguments for both sides.

For example,

Arguments for making assertions against Backend copy:

• This is what the user actually sees, so asserting against copy gives us a lot more confidence.
• There are tricky copy changes that a test-id assertion would not be able to give us valuable confidence on like error states.

Arguments for not making making assertions against Backend copy:

• Here we make assertions on test-ids that are more stable than backend. So backend can make copy changes without hurting the Frontend team.
• Backend already tests the copy changes themselves. Additionally there's a PR review process for confirming the Backend changes are correct. So, asserting against the copy on Frontend means we're just duplicating these tests across the company.

So, I'm pretty curious what others think about this and what solutions ya'll have come up with at your workplaces to mitigate these types of issues.

Thanks in advance for your time 🙏