write-tests

Write Tests

A good test fails only when real behavior breaks, and passes through every refactor or config change that preserves it. Most bad tests fail the opposite way: red on harmless changes, green while the real path is broken. Every rule below serves that one goal.

Workflow: tracer bullets, not a batch

1. Write ONE test at a time. Assert first, watch it go red on the un-fixed code, make the code earn green, learn, then write the next. Never a batch up front: a batch written against imagined behavior pins what you guessed — those tests pass when the mechanism breaks and fail when it's fine. Each green cycle tells you what the next test should actually assert.
2. Iterate on the fastest focused runner (one file, one test name), and run the full suite only as a final gate before handing off. Check the exit code, not just the output — a runner that prints nothing and a green run look the same. On failures, read EVERY red test before fixing one; they often share a root cause.
3. Before calling it done, prove the test can fail (below) and walk the review checklist.

What to assert

• Observable behavior through the outermost practical entry point — return values, exit codes, persisted rows, HTTP responses, rendered output — never which internal functions ran or how a value is computed. A test on the public surface survives a rewrite of everything underneath; a test that reaches into internals breaks on every refactor and pins implementation, not behavior. Reserve isolated unit tests for genuinely tricky pure logic (parsers, schedulers, state machines).
• Nothing the compiler already guarantees. A test that re-asserts a type signature — field shapes, rejected argument types — can only fail if the compiler failed first. Spend the budget on business rules, arithmetic, branching, ordering, edge cases, side effects.
• Actual values, not collection sizes. For dedup/normalize/idempotency paths, length == 1 passes even when normalization is broken; also assert the stored value equals the expected canonical form.
• The smallest scale that can show the behavior. Two entities and one mechanism before crowds and integration; small tests fail fast with readable state and don't entangle five behaviors in one assert.
• The design contract, not current behavior. When a test goes red, the reflex is to re-measure and pin the new number — resist it: a bar calibrated to whatever the code currently does silently encodes bugs as baseline. Write the assert from the stated contract and make the code earn it; if no contract exists, that's a question for the owner, not a number to measure-and-pin. Recalibrating is legitimate only when the contract itself changed.
• Deterministic claims tight, stochastic claims as distributions. An invariant that holds every run gets an exact threshold. Anything noisy or tuning-dependent ("A usually beats B", "load balances evenly") must be asserted over a set of runs/seeds as a band — a single-sample pin on a stochastic outcome is not a weak test, it is a blind one: it certifies whatever the lucky sample did and can mask a systematic bias for months. If you must assert a noisy differential, widen the margin and name it chaos-marginal in a comment.

Seams and mocks

• Don't couple tests to config — mock the seam. A test keyed to a live config value (which flag is on, which tier is default) breaks when someone legitimately edits config. The fix is never skipIf/conditionals — a skipped assertion hides the coupling and stops covering the path. Feed the function fixed inputs, or stub the lookup so fixture ids resolve to fixed values. Litmus: "would this break if a config value changed with no logic change?"
• Don't over-mock — every mock is a frozen assumption. Mock at the system's edges (network, clock, filesystem, third-party SDK, config lookup), never internal collaborators. Stubbing an internal hard-codes its current contract; refactor it and the test lies. Never make "was called with" the primary assertion when an observable outcome exists. Mocking three internal modules to test one function means: test one layer up, where they're real.
• Harnesses must wire the system the way production does. If a bug only showed up against a real environment, the harness skipped an input production always sets — fix the harness, don't just fix the bug.

Control variables and probes

• One variable per comparison. Pin everything else — same seed, same counts, same configuration on both arms; disable mechanisms that aren't the subject. When a comparison test breaks, first ask whether an unrelated mechanism leaked into the experiment before touching the code under test.
• Validate, don't assume. Never reason your way to a conclusion about cause — which path fired, where the failures come from — and act on it. Write a throwaway probe that reads public state and prints; the plausible story is wrong often enough to burn a session, and one probe redirects the whole effort. Probes are scratch: put them where they cannot be committed, delete them the moment the question is answered, or promote them into a real test if the behavior deserves a permanent guard.

Prove the test can fail

A test you never saw fail is decoration. For any regression test — especially one written after the fix — falsify it once: revert or break the production code the way the bug would, confirm red for the expected reason, restore, confirm green. Verify the revert actually took: a stash or checkout with a wrong pathspec reverts nothing, silently, and the "red" run quietly tests the fixed code. The tell: the "red" numbers equal the green numbers.

When a test goes red after a change

Triage in order of likelihood before editing anything:

1. The test encodes deleted semantics — it pinned an accident of the old implementation. Re-spec it to the contract's real claim.
2. The experiment lost control of a variable — a new mechanism leaks in. Pin the variable.
3. The margin was chaos-tight. Widen it, with a comment saying so.
4. The code is actually wrong. Probe the state, find the mechanism.

Never tune constants to make one test pass without rerunning the neighbors: coupled systems reshuffle. If two consecutive tweaks each break different tests, stop poking — the control surface is wrong; find the mechanism.

Review checklist

Walk this on any test diff, apply fixes in the same pass, re-run the suite:

1. Does an assertion restate a type guarantee? → delete it.
2. Would it break on a config edit with no logic change, or is it skipIf-conditional on config? → mock the seam.
3. Are assertions mostly mocked-internal "called with"? → test a layer up against observable output.
4. Does it pin a single sample of a stochastic outcome? → assert a distribution.
5. Does it assert a count without the value on a dedup/normalize path? → add the value assertion.
6. Is the function under test still called in production? → if the only callers are tests, delete the function and the test together.
7. Can it fail for the right reason? → falsify once to confirm.