Testing Strategy Models and Lanes (2026)

Audience: module owners and test-automation engineers choosing the right test types for a Stella Ops project, and CI maintainers wiring those tests into lanes.

Purpose

• Define a single testing taxonomy for all Stella Ops project types.
• Make determinism, offline readiness, and evidence integrity testable by default.
• Align CI lanes with a shared catalog so coverage is visible and enforceable.

Strategy in brief

• Use test models (L0, S1, C1, W1, WK1, T1, AN1, CLI1, PERF) to encode required test types.
• Map every module to one or more models in docs/technical/testing/TEST_CATALOG.yml.
• Run tests through standardized CI lanes (Unit, Contract, Integration, Security, Performance, Live).

Test models (requirements)

• L0 (Library/Core): unit + property + snapshot + determinism.
• S1 (Storage/Postgres): migrations + idempotency + concurrency + query ordering.
• T1 (Transport/Queue): protocol roundtrip + fuzz invalid + delivery semantics.
• C1 (Connector/External): fixtures + snapshot + resilience + security; optional Live smoke.
• W1 (WebService/API): contract + authz + OTel trace assertions + negative cases.
• WK1 (Worker/Indexer): end-to-end job flow + retries + idempotency + telemetry.
• AN1 (Analyzer/SourceGen): Roslyn harness + diagnostics + golden generated output.
• CLI1 (Tool/CLI): exit codes + golden output + deterministic formatting.
• PERF (Benchmark): perf smoke subset + regression thresholds (relative).

Repository foundations

• TestKit primitives: deterministic time/random, canonical JSON asserts, snapshot helpers, Postgres/Valkey fixtures, OTel capture.
• Determinism gate: canonical bytes and stable hashes for SBOM/VEX/verdict artifacts.
• Hybrid reachability posture: graph DSSE mandatory; edge-bundle DSSE optional/targeted with deterministic ordering.
• Architecture guards: enforce cross-module dependency boundaries (no lattice in Concelier/Excititor).
• Offline defaults: no network access unless explicitly tagged Live.

CI lanes (standard filters)

• Unit: fast, offline; includes property and snapshot sub-traits.
• Contract: schema/OpenAPI stability and response envelopes.
• Integration: Testcontainers-backed service and storage tests.
• Security: authz/negative tests and security regressions.
• Performance: perf smoke and benchmark guards.
• Live: opt-in upstream connector checks (never PR gating by default).

Documentation moments (when to update)

• New model or required test type: update the test catalog (docs/technical/testing/TEST_CATALOG.yml).
• New lane or gate: update TEST_SUITE_OVERVIEW.md and ci-quality-gates.md.
• Module-specific test policy change: update the module dossier under docs/modules/<module>/.
• New fixtures or runnable harnesses: place under docs/benchmarks/** or tests/** and link here.

Related artifacts

• Test catalog (source of truth): docs/technical/testing/TEST_CATALOG.yml
• Test suite overview
• Quality guardrails implementation
• Testing enhancements architecture
• Code samples from the advisory: docs/benchmarks/testing/better-testing-strategy-samples.md

Turn #6 Enhancements (2026-01-27)

Source advisory: Testing Enhancements (Automation Turn #6) Sprint: docs/implplan/SPRINT_0127_002_DOCS_testing_enhancements_turn6.md

New test intent categories

Every non-trivial test must declare intent. Intent clarifies why the behavior exists.

public static class TestIntents
{
    public const string Regulatory = "Regulatory";   // Compliance, audit, legal
    public const string Safety = "Safety";           // Security, fail-secure, crypto
    public const string Performance = "Performance"; // Latency, throughput, resources
    public const string Competitive = "Competitive"; // Parity with competitor tools
    public const string Operational = "Operational"; // Observability, operability
}

// Usage
[Trait("Intent", TestIntents.Safety)]
[Trait("Category", "Unit")]
public void Signer_RejectsExpiredCertificate() { /* ... */ }

New test trait categories

Updated test model requirements

New CI lanes

Observability contract requirements (W1 model)

WebService tests must validate:

• OTel spans: required spans exist, attributes present, cardinality bounded.
• Structured logs: required fields present, no PII, appropriate log levels.
• Metrics: required metrics exist, label cardinality bounded, counters monotonic.

[Trait("Category", "Observability")]
[Trait("Intent", "Operational")]
public async Task Scanner_EmitsRequiredTelemetry()
{
    using var otel = new OtelCapture();
    await sut.ScanAsync(request);

    OTelContractAssert.HasRequiredSpans(otel, "ScanImage", "ExtractLayers", "AnalyzeSBOM");
    OTelContractAssert.NoHighCardinalityAttributes(otel, threshold: 100);
}

Evidence traceability requirements

Regulatory tests must link to requirements:

[Requirement("REQ-EVIDENCE-001")]
[Trait("Intent", "Regulatory")]
public void EvidenceBundle_IsImmutableAfterSigning() { /* ... */ }

CI generates traceability matrix: requirement -> test -> artifact.

Cross-version testing requirements (Interop)

For modules with schema or API versioning:

• Test N-1 compatibility (current server, previous client).
• Test N+1 compatibility (previous server, current client).
• Document compatibility matrix.

Time-extended testing requirements (Longevity)

For worker modules (WK1 model):

• Memory stability: verify no growth under sustained load.
• Connection pool stability: verify no leaks.
• Counter drift: verify values remain bounded.

Run duration: 1+ hours for nightly, 4+ hours for release validation.

Post-incident testing requirements

For P1/P2 production incidents:

1. Capture event sequence via replay infrastructure.
2. Generate test scaffold from replay manifest.
3. Include incident metadata (ID, root cause, severity).
4. Tag with [Trait("Category", "PostIncident")].
5. Test failures block releases.