test-strategy

name	test-strategy
description	Analyze testing approach — what to test, how to test, coverage gaps, and test quality. Trigger on /test-strategy, or when planning tests, reviewing test gaps, or debugging flaky tests.
user-invocable	true
allowed-tools	Read, Grep, Glob, Bash

Test Strategy

Decide what to test and how. Focus on risk, not coverage percentages.

Workflow

1. Map the test surface

• What are the public APIs / entry points?
• What are the critical paths (auth, payment, data persistence)?
• What has changed recently (high regression risk)?
• What has no tests at all?

2. Test type selection

Type	When to use	When NOT to use
Unit	Pure logic, utilities, isolated components	When test needs DB/network/filesystem
Integration	DB queries, API routes, external service calls	When setup cost > value of test
E2E	Critical user journeys, payment flows	For internal implementation details
Snapshot	UI output, serialization formats	For large data that changes often

3. Test quality check

• Meaningful assertions — does it assert the right thing, or just that nothing threw?
• Test isolation — do tests share state that causes flakiness?
• Coverage honesty — does line coverage actually mean behavior coverage?
• Over-mocking — are mocks so thick that the test passes but production breaks?

4. Gap analysis

• Untested error paths (network error, DB timeout, auth failure).
• Untested edge cases (empty results, max input, concurrent access).
• Untested configurations (feature flags, env variants).
• Tests that pass for the wrong reason (overfit to implementation).

5. Flaky test protocol

• Isolate: does it fail consistently on certain conditions?
• Stabilize: fix the root cause, not retry the test.
• Quarantine: move flaky tests to a separate suite if they block CI.

Experience Log

This skill learns from experience. Mechanism:

• Read .claude/experience/test-strategy.md at skill start to benefit from past lessons.
• Write to .claude/experience/test-strategy.md after use if you learned something new.
• Format: YYYY-MM-DD: <lesson> — one line per entry.
• Evolve: If the same issue repeats 3+ times, update this SKILL.md itself.