Testing Guidelines

Testing Guidelines

This skill treats tests as protection for project-owned behavior, not as a coverage ritual. It favors cheap sans-I/O tests and rejects tests that merely restate test-double configuration, third-party libraries, or transparent wiring.

A meaningful test protects an exact project-owned invariant with an independently derived oracle at a level capable of observing a realistic defect. When the available infrastructure cannot provide that evidence, add no test and record the coverage gap when protection is still required.

Test Admission

Test behavior that the project owns. Assume third-party libraries are correct and already tested.

Add a test only when it can fail because project-owned behavior is wrong.

Before adding or retaining a test, require all of the following:

• Name the exact project-owned invariant that the test protects.
• Name a realistic defect that violates that invariant and causes the test to fail.
• Derive the expected result independently of test-double configuration.
• Select the test level capable of observing that defect.
• Treat missing contract or integration infrastructure as a coverage gap. Test doubles cannot substitute for that infrastructure.

Project-owned behavior includes:

• Business rules and calculations.
• State-machine transitions and exhaustive decisions.
• Transformations that add domain meaning.
• Selection, retry, fallback, caching, and persistence policy.
• Error translation that adds a stable project contract.

Do not add a test when the implementation only forwards values to a dependency and returns its result unchanged.

Existing-Test Review

Delete a test when it only:

• Repeats third-party documentation.
• Asserts schema-library mechanics.
• Verifies a one-to-one forwarding wrapper.
• Asserts test-double configuration.
• Checks getters, constructors, or field assignment without behavior.
• Exercises framework plumbing without a project-owned contract.

Do not preserve a useless test for coverage. Coverage is evidence of execution, not evidence of meaningful verification.

Effective Strategies for Test Admission and Review

Follow the guidelines below. Read each linked reference that applies before writing, approving, or retaining tests.

1. Test only behavior that the project owns.
   • Treat documented third-party dependencies as already verified.
   • Exclude tests that only prove delegation through transparent wrappers.
2. Require independent evidence that a test protects a project-owned invariant.
   • Reject circular fixtures and substituted-boundary claims with the test-double admission diagnostics.
   • Match each defect to an observable test level, including no test when the available level cannot provide meaningful evidence.