Project Config And Tests

This is a composable project overlay, not a standalone implementation workflow. Use it with matching language or discipline guidance when the main task is a configuration contract or deterministic tests at that boundary.

For review, inspect these contracts and report findings without editing config, tests, or process state. For implementation, apply only the requested changes and use isolated fixtures for validation.

When to use

The task involves configuration sources or precedence, defaults, parsing, normalization, path resolution, or deterministic tests around those seams.

Not for

Do not use this for general feature work (use the matching principle skill and add project-core-dev only when repository-specific completion evidence is not concrete), general test strategy (tester-mindset), framework-specific test implementation, vendored dependency changes (project-vendor-boundary), release-only work (project-release-maintainer), or environment diagnosis whose cause has not been isolated (project-platform-diagnose).

Workflow

1. Establish the contract before editing: sources, precedence, defaults, and the behavior of missing, empty, malformed, and unsupported values.
2. Preserve help, version, and recovery paths when they can operate safely without valid config. Fail fast or fail closed when continuing would be unsafe or would silently apply misleading behavior.
3. Separate pure parsing and normalization from environment, filesystem, and process-global lookup when the existing design permits it.
4. Make tests independent of ambient environment, current directory, user home, wall-clock time, and shared filesystem state. Use the repo's fixtures and temporary-directory helpers, and clean up any remaining state.
5. Cover precedence and representative missing, empty, invalid, override, relative, absolute, and platform-sensitive path cases that belong to the supported contract. Do not simulate unsupported platforms and present the result as observed evidence.
6. Keep defaults, example config, help text, and documentation aligned. Avoid printing secret values in diagnostics or test output.

Completion

• Run the narrowest relevant config and path tests plus the checks required by any selected principle skill.
• Use coverage or benchmarks only when they answer a concrete risk; do not make percentage coverage or routine benchmarking the objective.
• Report untested platform behavior, unavailable tooling, and any remaining dependence on ambient state.