Context and Problem Statement¶

As our UI component library grows, we need a systematic way to document, showcase, and test our reusable components. This documentation should:

1. Provide interactive examples of components in various states
2. Serve as a living style guide for the team
3. Facilitate collaboration between designers and developers
4. Allow testing components in isolation
5. Make it easier for new team members to discover and understand available components

How can we effectively document and showcase our UI component library?

Decision Drivers¶

• Developer familiarity and learning curve
• Integration with our existing React/TypeScript stack
• Support for component variants and interactive examples
• Ability to document component APIs and usage patterns
• Maintenance overhead
• Community support and ecosystem

Considered Options¶

• Storybook
• Styleguidist
• Custom documentation solution

Decision Outcome¶

Chosen option: "Storybook", because:

1. It's the most familiar to the development team and aligns with shared tooling already used in other tech stacks
2. It has the largest community and ecosystem of addons
3. It provides excellent integration with React and TypeScript
4. It offers robust features for component documentation, testing, and interaction
5. It supports automatic documentation generation from TypeScript types and JSDoc comments

Positive Consequences¶

• Improved component discoverability for developers
• Better collaboration between designers and developers with a shared visual language
• Ability to test components in isolation
• Living documentation that stays in sync with the codebase
• Streamlined onboarding process for new team members

Negative Consequences¶

• Additional build step in the development process
• Learning curve for developers not familiar with Storybook
• Maintenance overhead for keeping stories up-to-date

Pros and Cons of the Options¶

Storybook¶

Storybook is a UI component explorer for frontend developers.

• Good, because it has a large, active community and extensive documentation
• Good, because it offers a rich ecosystem of addons for additional functionality
• Good, because it integrates well with React, TypeScript, and our existing toolchain
• Good, because it supports automatic API documentation generation from TypeScript types
• Good, because it provides features for visual testing and accessibility checks
• Good, because it's familiar to many team members from previous projects
• Bad, because it requires maintaining separate story files alongside components
• Bad, because it adds complexity to the build process

Styleguidist¶

React Styleguidist is a component development environment with hot reloaded dev server and a living style guide.

• Good, because it automatically generates documentation from component propTypes and comments
• Good, because it supports markdown documentation
• Good, because it has a simple setup process
• Bad, because it has a smaller community than Storybook
• Bad, because it has fewer addons and extensions
• Bad, because team members have less familiarity with it

Custom Documentation Solution¶

Building our own documentation system using React components.

• Good, because it would be tailored exactly to our needs
• Good, because it wouldn't introduce external dependencies
• Bad, because it would require significant development and maintenance effort
• Bad, because it would lack the features and ecosystem of established tools
• Bad, because it would require creating our own standards and patterns

Links¶

• Related to React Domain-Driven Folder Structure