Language Testing Strategy

language-testing-strategy

Registry Trigger

Use when

• Test evidence depends on runner discovery, process/thread/event-loop behavior, parallelism, deadlines, caching, instrumentation, or fixture lifecycle.
• An accepted test boundary needs language/runtime-specific harness behavior before its result is comparable locally and in CI.

Do not use when

• The open decision is the failure-to-test-level portfolio, oracle, or omission; use test-strategy and the relevant test-level capability.
• The runner and runtime behavior are fixed and no affected cache, isolation, concurrency, timeout, or tooling decision remains.

Skill Role

Define test-runner and runtime execution semantics through discovery, scheduling, deadlines, async completion, isolation, cache freshness, instrumentation, and reproducible failures. Exclude proof-portfolio and case selection.

High-Value Rules

• Verify runner version, configuration, discovery filters, shards, environment, and local/CI invocation from current repository sources before comparing results.
• Match test concurrency to the affected runtime model; shared module, class, process, database, port, or global state has an isolation owner, and a serial pass is not concurrency proof.
• Distinguish a runner timeout from the system deadline under test; cancellation reaches the subject, owned work terminates, and cleanup becomes observable before the harness exits.
• Await or join owned async work and surface background panics, rejected promises, task exceptions, and subprocess failures instead of letting the test finish first.
• Invalidate watch, incremental, test-result, transform, coverage, and build caches when their source, config, environment, generated input, or instrumentation key changes.
• Define fixture ownership for temporary paths, ports, environment, clock, randomness, locale, timezone, processes, and containers, including parallel isolation and cleanup on failure.
• Select failure-mechanism-specific test modes with reproducible first-failure evidence and repository-authorized limits.
• Return the language-test execution decision with inspected harness evidence, proof limits, and specialist routes even when no Reference loads.

Anti-Patterns

• A command catalog selects a runner or flag without checking the repository version and configuration.
• A cached, watched, serial, or filtered pass is reported as evidence for a different CI shard or runtime mode.
• A runner timeout or retry converts a hang, leak, deadlock, or flake into a passing result.
• Coverage or instrumentation changes scheduling, module loading, or emitted code while the result is treated as equivalent.

Stop Conditions

• Route risk portfolios to test-strategy and case design to unit-testing, integration-testing, contract-testing, e2e-testing, or frontend-testing.
• Route runner dependencies to package-dependency-management, lanes and cache keys to build-tool-professional-usage, and final freshness or sufficiency to quality-test-gate.

Output Contract

• language-test execution decision with runner discovery scheduling deadline cancellation async completion isolation cache instrumentation failure artifact proof limits and specialist routes

Targeted References