test-integrity-lens

Test quality analysis lens that hunts test theater and Iron Rule violations — tests that assert nothing real, or whose assertions were weakened to force a GREEN.

Role in the adversarial panel

This lens belongs to software-engineer-reviewer. It is activated on every DELIVER cycle — it is one of the 4 CORE lenses. It receives tests and production code. It does not see the journal or checklist.

graph LR
  SER[software-engineer-reviewer] -->|dispatches| TIL[test-integrity-lens]
  TIL -->|JSON verdict| SER

What the lens checks

G7 — Test theater

Anti-pattern Description Severity
Tautological test Assert.NotNull(result) as sole assertion; Assert.True(true); any assertion that can never fail blocker
Mock-dominated test More mock setup lines than assertion lines; no real Domain object instantiated blocker
Circular verification Test recalculates the expected value using the production formula blocker
Implementation mirroring Verify() / MustHaveHappened() without state assertion; asserting HOW instead of WHAT blocker
Fixture theater Setup creates the exact expected end-state; git diff shows only test file changes between RED and GREEN blocker

G9 — Iron Rule violation

Condition Severity
An assertion was weakened between commits (e.g. Assert.Equal(90, x) → Assert.NotNull(x)) blocker
A test was deleted to make the suite pass blocker
[Skip] added to a failing test blocker

Verdict and thresholds

Condition Verdict
At least one G7 anti-pattern or G9 violation fail
No test theater or Iron Rule violation pass

Every defect emitted by this lens is blocker — it cannot produce a lower severity verdict.

Invariants

« Never refactor a failing test. » — Freeman, S. & Pryce, N., Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests, 2009.

Sources

See also