conventions-testing

name	conventions-testing
description	Apply when writing or reviewing tests.

Testing Conventions

Apply when writing or reviewing tests.

What to test

Test when code has: parsing/transformation logic, security boundaries, business rules with arithmetic, state machines, non-obvious edge cases, or CRUD paths with auth, tenancy, validation, serialization, uploads/downloads, or other side effects. Skip: shallow CRUD handlers with no meaningful branching, library wrappers, layout components, constants.

Prefer invariants over examples

When the input space is large (parsers, document transforms, normalization, sorting/filtering, security boundaries, Unicode-heavy logic), start by asking what must always be true, then encode that as a property test, fuzzy test, or adversarial regression test. Reach for ordinary example tests when they communicate a business rule more clearly than a property.

Good property/fuzz targets in Stella: DOCX/OOXML roundtrips, template/block-directive parsing, filename and header sanitization, search/filter/sort helpers, tenant-scope enforcement, and error normalization.

Structure

Colocate foo.test.ts next to foo.ts. For frontend, default to extracting logic into foo.logic.ts and test that in Bun. Use Playwright for browser-only behavior: auth redirects, route guards, uploads/downloads, keyboard/focus, drag/drop, and viewer/editor flows. Structural invariant tests (auth enforcement, branded types) live in apps/api/src/tests/security/.

Rules

• Use bun:test for unit, invariant, and integration tests; use Playwright for browser behavior. Do not add another test runner without a clear gap Bun and Playwright cannot cover.
• Describe by behaviour, not by function name
• Avoid hidden shared mutable state. Prefer per-test setup; use beforeEach only for deterministic reset, and use expensive shared fixtures only when explicit and isolated
• Prefer plain fakes over mocking libraries for simple cases; use mocks when simulating failure modes, testing varied edge-case inputs, or isolating external services
• Do not mock.module a workspace module (@/..., @stll/..., a relative path), and always name the target with a string literal. The fabricated module never drifts with the real one, so the test keeps passing after the contract it depends on changes, and Bun's mock registry is process-wide. Inject the collaborator instead (handler context, an options parameter) and pass a plain fake; if the module wraps an external boundary, mock the npm package it calls or expose a test seam. no-internal-module-mock enforces this; existing pairs are grandfathered in scripts/internal-module-mock-ledger.json, which only shrinks: delete a line when you remove its mock, never add one.
• Assert observable behavior or an invariant, not the implementation sequence. A test that only proves "does not throw" or re-encodes the production algorithm needs a stronger assertion.
• Use snapshots only when the serialized output is itself a stable, reviewable contract. Do not use snapshots as a substitute for behavioral assertions.
• Test tenant isolation and ownership-source rules at the highest meaningful layer, not only as pure helper tests
• Every bug fix needs a durable guard, but not necessarily an example test: prefer types, derivation, schemas, lint rules, or broader invariants when they eliminate the bug class
• Guard the invariant, not the accident. Do not memorialize a one-off typo, stale literal, or incidental implementation detail in a dedicated test when structural coupling makes that failure impossible
• Avoid "tests for tests' sake": don't add shallow examples just to increase coverage if a stronger invariant test would cover the same surface with more signal
• Run tests through the owning package script so preloads and setup survive: bun run test -- --bail -t "<name>". Do not call a raw runner from the worktree root when the package script supplies configuration.
• Verify a new regression test fails against the known-bad behavior before trusting it. A test that never reaches the fault, or matches zero tests, is not a guard.
• Detector and backstop tests use production-shaped inputs the detector can actually match. Assert the fixture reaches or differs on the fault boundary before asserting the protected outcome.
• Where a map declares paths or cases, assert the declared and exercised sets are equal in both directions. Pin fixture literals that stand in for producer output with satisfies against the producer's return type.
• For systemic bugs, test the class: fixed points for replay, matrices for tenant isolation, properties for parsers/normalizers, state-machine transitions for lifecycle code, and round trips for serialization.
• Keep time, randomness, network, filesystem, and database ownership explicit in tests. Pin or inject them rather than relying on ambient machine state.
• Name the error a throw assertion expects. expect(...).toThrow() with no argument passes for every error, so it keeps passing once the code fails for an unrelated reason; pass a message substring, a regex, or the error class. no-vacuous-throw-assertion enforces this.

Mutation check

A test guarding behavior X is finished only once reverting X makes it fail. Until you have seen it go red against the known-bad behavior, it may be passing for an unrelated reason. When the test is the evidence for a fix, say in the PR that you ran the mutation and what it broke.

The usual failure is a fixture the fault cannot reach. Assert the fixture DIFFERS before asserting the equivalence: check expect(NFD(word)).not.toBe(NFC(word)) before asserting both normalize alike, so a fixture that is already normalized cannot make the test vacuous.

Cross-runtime contracts

Where one rule lives in two runtimes at once (JavaScript, Postgres, the search engine), parity is proven only by DERIVING the other side's rules executably: query the live extension for its token output, render the SQL the query layer emits and assert on that, read the analyzer's configuration tuple.

A hand-maintained list mirroring the other side's behavior is not evidence of parity. It is the drift, written down: it agrees with the other runtime exactly until that runtime changes, and nothing fails when it does.

Projection census

Any "marked done" flag that mirrors state in an external system (search index, object store, queue) ships with a reconciler that compares both sides and reports the difference. Acceptance by the remote system is not durability, so the flag alone can never prove the projection landed.

Treat the reconciler as part of the feature, not follow-up work: without it the first divergence is invisible until a user reports missing data.