Agent Skills: Testing

Testing

Use tests as design feedback and regression protection. Prefer tests that prove observable behaviour through public APIs over tests that mirror implementation structure.

Decision Tree

What is the task?
|-- New behaviour or bug fix
|   |-- Can the behaviour be observed through a public API? -> write the test there
|   `-- Is the seam missing or awkward? -> simplify the design before adding doubles
|-- Refactor existing code
|   |-- Behaviour already covered? -> refactor behind the tests
|   `-- Behaviour not covered? -> characterise it first, then refactor
|-- Invariant or illegal state to protect
|   |-- Can a type make it unrepresentable? -> change the type, skip the test
|   `-- Large input space? -> property-based tests alongside named examples
|-- Flaky or brittle tests
|   `-- remove time/order/network coupling and implementation-detail assertions
`-- Coverage report, thresholds, or CI/hook enforcement
    `-- Use the test-coverage skill

Core Rules

• Prefer TDD for behavioural changes: see the failure, make it pass, then refactor.
• Test observable behaviour through public APIs, not implementation details.
• Keep tests deterministic and order-independent.
• Make each test's why clear from its name, setup, and assertions.
• A failing test should point at the cause quickly; vague failures are test design problems.
• Prefer real values and simple pure tests before introducing doubles.

Types Before Tests

The cheapest test is one you never write because the bug cannot compile. Before testing an invariant, ask whether a type can make the bad state unrepresentable — a constrained type with a smart constructor, a union per lifecycle state, NonEmptyList for "at least one". If it can, change the type instead: that is a compile-time check that deletes a whole class of guard tests.

• Don't test what the type forbids. Feeding illegal values to an internal function that cannot receive them tests the language, not your code. Validate once at a boundary parser / smart constructor, and trust the type inward — an always-valid model needs no defensive re-tests at every layer.
• Relocate, don't delete. Making a value a type moves the tests to the constructor — but test the rules you authored, not the engine. A hand-rolled smart constructor is logic you wrote: cover valid-accepted, invalid-rejected, and edges. A schema-library parser (zod, valibot, pydantic) is declarative config over a pre-tested engine: test only your custom refinements, transforms, and cross-field constraints — re-testing the library's primitives is testing the framework. Downstream code then needs no tests for inputs it can't hold.
• The guarantee is only as strong as the boundary. Where types are erased at runtime (TypeScript), "trust the type inward" holds only if the boundary did a real runtime parse — a schema library, not a cast (as) or any. A type is a compile-time claim the parser makes true at runtime. What no library covers: whether your schema matches what the producer actually sends — guard that drift with a contract test or a captured sample (see Contract Testing).
• Define errors out of existence, too. Redefining an operation so the edge case is normal — a total function over a tested special case — deletes its edge-case test with it. Design mechanic in architecture → Error Handling.

Choosing the Layer

Choose the narrowest layer that proves the behaviour.

| Layer | Use for | Shape | |---|---|---| | Pure core | Business rules, parsing, validation, calculations | Unit tests with real values | | Application/use case | Decisions across owned ports | Public API tests with fakes for owned ports | | Adapter | Database, queue, filesystem, third-party integration code | Contract/integration tests against real infrastructure where practical | | Scenario | Critical vertical journeys across routing, auth, UI/API, and owned state | Real app composition, real owned infrastructure where cheap, fake only externals | | Composition | Wiring, CLI, HTTP handlers, UI journeys | A few integration/e2e checks for critical paths |

Do not use e2e tests to compensate for untested domain logic. Do not use unit tests to assert wiring that only fails when components are composed.

Test altitude: aim at the stable contract

The "unit" worth testing is a behaviour through a stable public contract, not a layer or a class (Ian Cooper, "TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong"). So don't pick a layer — aim each test at the deepest stable interface that keeps setup cheap and failures localised; the level you land on is a consequence, not a goal.

• Depth, not height, buys refactor-resilience. A deep module — a narrow interface over a rich, churning implementation — changes its interface rarely while its body churns, so a test pinned to that interface survives the refactor and still exercises everything behind it (architecture → Module Depth). A shallow interface is never a good target: make the module deep first, or test the pure core beneath it. Tests bound to internal structure (class shape, private methods) are glue that pins the design — the cost this rule avoids.
• Push combinatorial coverage down to the pure core. A pure function's signature is already a stable contract, so cover branchy logic (pricing, rules matrices, parsers) directly with table or property-based tests — don't enumerate its cases through a deep facade, which adds setup, blurs shrinking, and buries the failure.
• Keep a low-gear inner loop while a contract is molten. Testing close to the code is where you feel the friction that drives a better design. That coupling is temporary and the point; once the design settles, lift the bulk to the stable interface and delete the scaffolding a higher test now subsumes.

"Stable" is an end-state: while the contract churns, low gear is correct, not a fallback. Exercise the stable interface heavily for representative behaviours and integration — but it is only genuinely cheap once builders/fakes make the arrange step cheap.

Shell, zsh and POSIX sh testing

Choose shell test tooling by the language boundary being tested:

• Bash-heavy CLI/code: bats-core is a good default.
• Cross-shell shell functions/libraries: prefer ShellSpec.
• POSIX sh portability: run the same behaviour tests under multiple real shells (dash, busybox sh, bash --posix, etc.).
• zsh-native functions/autoloads/completions: test inside zsh with isolated shell state; Bats can black-box execute zsh commands but is not a zsh-native test language.

Prefer black-box CLI tests for scripts: arguments, exit status, stdout, stderr, and filesystem effects. For shell functions, isolate PATH, HOME/ZDOTDIR, temp dirs, fixtures, and shell options.

See references/shell-testing.md for tool comparison, zsh isolation patterns, POSIX multi-shell loops, example harnesses, and keeping suites fast.

Scenario (integration) tests

A useful named layer sits between application and composition: run the real application end to end and fake only the externals you don't own (third-party HTTP, email delivery, payment providers), switching the faked external state per test.

• Cover named user/business journeys, not matrices: lifecycle transitions, permissions, locale, persistence, resumability, and other places where several boundaries must agree.
• Use app-owned setup and cleanup surfaces when they exist - admin APIs, public APIs, CLI commands - so the test validates the same contracts operators and users rely on. Direct storage setup is a fallback when the public setup seam is absent or prohibitively slow.
• Fake at the network boundary (e.g. MSW server-side), not by stubbing your own modules - routing, parsing, middleware, and wiring all run for real.
• Define named backend states ("payment succeeds", "auth times out") and select one per test instead of restarting the app or re-mocking by hand.
• Isolate both browser state and backend state: create unique records, clean them up in fixture teardown, restore any global flags, and tag parallel tests with an id (e.g. an injected header) so concurrent tests don't share mocked state.
• Prefer user-facing selectors and web-first assertions. Add stable accessible scopes to repeated UI regions (e.g. a named role="group") instead of reaching for DOM structure.
• Keep slow scenario suites on an explicit command unless they are tiny and mission-critical for every commit. Run serially only for unavoidable global state, and say why.

Reach for it to prove a vertical slice works without standing up real third-party services. It complements, and does not replace, a few true e2e checks and exhaustive domain tests. See references/scenario-testing.md when designing a scenario suite, choosing setup/cleanup seams, or debugging scenario flakiness.

Testing at multiple boundaries

"Narrowest layer" is the default, not an absolute. Deliberately re-test the same business rule at more than one boundary (e.g. the domain function and the HTTP API) when defense in depth earns the duplication:

• Duplicate business rules, not plumbing. Re-prove a rule at each public entry point; test plumbing (status codes, parsing, DOM details) only at the layer it lives in.
• Why pay for it: which layer's test fails tells you which boundary broke; two layers re-implementing a rule surface drift the moment one changes; the rule survives as suites erode.
• The cost is real: every rule change touches every layer that asserts it.

Stop duplicating and sample at the outer layer instead when: the inner layer becomes a thin wrapper (ceremony outweighs the rule), the outer surface explodes to many endpoints, suite runtime crosses a pain threshold (keep the domain exhaustive, sample the API), or there is only ever one consumer behind a trivial forwarder.

Test Doubles

Avoid mocks by default; they tend to couple tests to call order and internal collaboration.

• Pure core should not need doubles.
• Use fakes for ports you own when real infrastructure would make tests slow or nondeterministic.
• Test adapters with real infrastructure where feasible, or with contract tests that prove the adapter fulfils the port.
• For expensive or hostile external systems, fake at an application-owned port and keep at least one smoke/integration check where practical.
• If a test needs many mocks, reconsider the boundary rather than adding more mocking.

The mirror-test trap: a test that mocks the very collaborator whose behaviour it claims to verify proves wiring, not behaviour — and stays green when the real behaviour breaks. A handler test that stubs validateBooking to return a rejection and then asserts the handler returns 400 never exercises the real rule: delete the rule and the test still passes, because the test supplied the rejection itself. Such tests also survive mutation of the mocked unit. Assert against the real collaborator, or prove the rule at its own layer.

Property-Based Tests

Use property-based tests when examples under-sample the behaviour:

• parsers and serialisers
• normalisation and canonicalisation
• permissions matrices
• state machines
• ordering, sorting, deduplication
• arithmetic, date/time, ranges
• round trips and invariants

Write properties as invariants over generated inputs, not randomised examples. Keep generators valid by construction where possible. When an invariant is structural (non-empty, bounded, exactly-one), prefer encoding it as a type (e.g. NonEmptyList) over a "never empty" property — a compile-time guarantee beats a sampled one and needs no generator. Keep named example tests for edge cases and regression stories; use property tests to explore the input space around them.

Failures shrink automatically to a minimal counterexample — persist that case as a regression example so the specific failure is checked deterministically forever. For stateful systems, generate a sequence of operations and check them against a simple in-memory model (model-based testing).

See property-based-testing.md for per-ecosystem frameworks (fast-check, Hypothesis, proptest, rapid/gopter), shrinking, stateful/model-based testing, CI integration, and pitfalls.

Differential & Metamorphic Testing

Use these when there is no reliable oracle — you cannot state the correct output, only relationships between outputs. They are the backbone of compiler, parser, database, numeric, and ML testing.

• Differential: run the same input through two independent implementations (or old vs new version) and assert they agree. Cheap and powerful for safe refactors and for parsers/compilers — keep the reference implementation as the oracle.
• Metamorphic: assert a relation between related inputs when no single output is checkable — sin(x) == sin(pi - x); permuting training data should not change a model's accuracy; add-then-remove restores state. Usually expressed as a property (see above), so reach for your PBT framework.

Snapshot & Approval Tests

Snapshot tools (Jest/Vitest snapshots, insta for Rust, syrupy for Python, ApprovalTests) record output and diff future runs against it. Useful for large, semantically meaningful serialised output — but they fail open and degrade:

• Snapshot rot / rubber-stamping: when a snapshot breaks, the path of least resistance is update-and-merge, so the snapshot ends up asserting "what the code currently does", not what it should.
• Over-broad snapshots bury the one meaningful line among hundreds of irrelevant ones; every change churns the snapshot and nobody reads the diff.

Use them well: keep snapshots small and targeted (snapshot the one derived value, not the whole DOM/object), review every update as real code, and prefer explicit assertions whenever you can name the expectation. Treat a snapshot-only test as roughly assertion-free for quality purposes. Avoid snapshots for incidental structure.

Assertion Quality

A test with no assertion only proves "it did not throw". Make each test's assertions name the behaviour they protect. As a cheap guard, flag assertion-free tests in lint/CI (e.g. ESLint jest/expect-expect, or AST/grep checks for test functions lacking assert/expect/require). Assertion count is a weak, gameable proxy — the rigorous measure of "do my assertions actually catch bugs" is mutation testing, owned by the test-coverage skill.

Contract Testing

Two senses, both about proving a boundary without a full end-to-end stack:

• Adapter/port contract (within one codebase): one test suite run against both the real adapter and any fake proves they satisfy the same port. Prefer this over mocks for owned ports (see Test Doubles).
• Consumer-driven contract (across independently deployed services, e.g. Pact): the consumer publishes the requests/responses it relies on; the provider verifies it still satisfies them. Sits between integration and e2e, catching cross-service breaks cheaply. Pitfalls: broker/tooling overhead and false confidence if contracts drift from real usage. For HTTP, schema/OpenAPI contract testing is lighter when one side owns the spec.

Refactoring Existing Code

Before refactoring, characterise current behaviour through public APIs. Commit those tests separately while the old implementation still exists. Then refactor behind the tests.

If behaviour is unclear, preserve it first and ask before changing it. Use golden or approval tests only when output is large and semantically meaningful. Avoid snapshots for incidental structure.

Fixing Bugs

Prove the bug is detectable before fixing it. Add or adjust a failing test, enable the strict check, or reproduce the failing command. The red step does not need a commit, but it should be real enough to prove the fix.

After the fix, run the narrowest relevant check first, then the broader checks needed for confidence.

Flaky Tests

A flaky test (passes and fails on the same code) erodes trust in the whole suite. Retry-to-green is an anti-pattern — auto-rerunning until a pass hides a real defect (usually a race, shared state, or order-dependency) and lets it ship.

• Detect: re-run suspected tests to surface flakiness, not mask it (pytest-rerunfailures, go test -count=N, seed/order shuffling to expose order-dependence). CI test-analytics (Datadog, Buildkite, GitHub) track per-test pass/fail history over time.
• Quarantine, then fix: move a confirmed-flaky test out of the blocking gate into a tracked quarantine with an owner and a deadline — do not skip and forget, and do not leave it blocking the build. Root-cause it: timing, shared state, network, or nondeterministic ordering.
• Bounded polling is not retry-to-green. Polling a genuinely asynchronous result until it appears, with a timeout, is correct; re-running a whole test until it passes masks a race. The first waits for a known-pending outcome; the second hides nondeterminism.

Prevention is design: keep tests deterministic and order-independent, and remove time/network coupling (see Core Rules).

References

• property-based-testing.md — Per-ecosystem PBT frameworks, shrinking, stateful/model-based testing, CI integration, and pitfalls.
• scenario-testing.md - Critical-journey selection, setup/cleanup through public surfaces, external fakes, accessible selectors, runtime policy, and anti-patterns for scenario/e2e suites.
• shell-testing.md — Bats/ShellSpec/shUnit2/cram trade-offs, zsh isolation, POSIX multi-shell testing, shell fakes, and keeping suites fast (parallelism, fixture amortisation, removing time-coupling).
• For coverage reports, thresholds, exclusions, mutation testing, fuzzing, and CI/hook enforcement of test quality, use the test-coverage skill.