Testing Strategy

Bias toward integration tests — they verify what users actually experience and survive refactoring. Unit tests are for pure logic with many branches. Part of the dev-* development-cycle skill set (see dev-cycle).

This skill covers the everyday suite that runs on every test invocation. For the heavier production-parity tier — real brokers, local blockchains, real sockets, network-fault injection, run on demand rather than per commit — see dev-e2e-testing.

Choose the Smallest Test That Proves the Contract

• Reuse existing coverage if it already detects a regression in the changed behavior. Trivial edits need no new test.
• For new nontrivial behavior or a bug fix, add a durable check at the cheapest stable seam: unit tests for pure logic, integration tests for storage/protocol contracts, E2E for cross-system behavior.
• Test the requested result and relevant failure cases, not a test-count or coverage-percentage quota. For a bug fix, observe the check fail before the fix and pass after it; expected values come from an independent source.
• Respect the requested test scope. Suggest a broader check only when the narrower one misses a concrete risk.

Databases: Match Fidelity to the Behavior

Use the project's existing local harness when it proves the contract: