Testing Best Practices

Practical QA guidance for turning product behavior, requirements, and code paths into useful checks. Use this skill for manual test cases, test plans, coverage reviews, automation scenarios, unit tests, locators for integration tests, /unit-test-grill, and /testcase-grill.

The central idea is not a specific framework. The central idea is testing discipline:

• Start from the user-visible or public contract: what must work, what may fail, and what must never happen.
• Choose the right testing format for the risk: exploratory notes, manual test cases, regression checklist, unit coverage, integration scenario, or automation task.
• Make every check prove a meaningful behavior, requirement, branch, state transition, error path, or cleanup guarantee.
• Keep coverage focused. Test independent dimensions separately, avoid noisy Cartesian products, and skip arbitrary edge values that only retest the platform.
• Preserve project reality by reading nearby tests, existing QA artifacts, product flows, schemas, and automation conventions before adding new structure.
• Treat integration-test locators and test data as maintained testing APIs, changing schema, implementation, and affected checks together.

Use the specific rule files after choosing the testing subject. The current detailed rules cover automated unit tests, semantic integration locators, and repository-stored product test cases; for other QA formats, apply the core defaults in this file and keep the output concrete enough for a tester or automation engineer to execute.

When to Apply

Reference these guidelines when: