4.2 KiB
Stella Ops — Incremental Testing Enhancements (NEW since prior runs) Only net-new ideas and practices; no restatement of earlier guidance.
1) Unit Testing — what to add now
- Semantic fuzzing for policies: generate inputs that specifically target policy boundaries (quotas, geo rules, sanctions, priority overrides), not random fuzz.
- Time-skew simulation: unit tests that warp time (clock drift, leap seconds, TTL expiry) to catch cache and signature failures.
- Decision explainability tests: assert that every routing decision produces a minimal, machine-readable explanation payload (even if not user-facing).
Why it matters: catches failures that only appear under temporal or policy edge conditions.
2) Module / Source-Level Testing — new practices
- Policy-as-code tests: treat routing and ops policies as versioned code with diff-based tests (policy change → expected behavior delta).
- Schema evolution tests: automatically replay last N schema versions against current code to ensure backward compatibility.
- Dead-path detection: fail builds if conditional branches are never exercised across the module test suite.
Why it matters: prevents silent behavior changes when policies or schemas evolve.
3) Integration Testing — new focus areas
- Production trace replay (sanitized): replay real, anonymized traces into integration environments to validate behavior against reality, not assumptions.
- Failure choreography tests: deliberately stagger dependency failures (A fails first, then B recovers, then A recovers) and assert system convergence.
- Idempotency verification: explicit tests that repeated requests under retries never create divergent state.
Why it matters: most real outages are sequencing problems, not single failures.
4) Deployment / E2E Testing — additions
- Config-diff E2E tests: assert that changing only config (no code) produces only the expected behavioral delta.
- Rollback lag tests: measure and assert maximum time-to-safe-state after rollback is triggered.
- Synthetic adversarial traffic: continuously inject malformed but valid-looking traffic post-deploy to ensure defenses stay active.
Why it matters: many incidents come from “safe” config changes and slow rollback propagation.
5) Competitor Parity Testing — next-level
- Behavioral fingerprinting: derive a compact fingerprint (outputs + timing + error shape) per request class and track drift over time.
- Asymmetric stress tests: apply load patterns competitors are known to struggle with and verify Stella Ops remains stable.
- Regression-to-market alerts: trigger alerts when Stella deviates from competitor norms in either direction (worse or suspiciously better).
Why it matters: parity isn’t static; it drifts quietly unless measured continuously.
6) New Cross-Cutting Standards to Enforce
- Tests as evidence: every integration/E2E run produces immutable artifacts suitable for audit or post-incident review.
- Deterministic replayability: any failed test must be reproducible bit-for-bit within 24 hours.
- Blast-radius annotation: every test declares what operational surface it covers (routing, auth, billing, compliance).
Prioritized Checklist — This Week Only
Immediate (1–2 days)
- Add decision-explainability assertions to core routing unit tests.
- Introduce time-skew unit tests for cache, TTL, and signature logic.
- Define and enforce idempotency tests on one critical integration path.
Short-term (by end of week) 4. Enable sanitized production trace replay in one integration suite. 5. Add rollback lag measurement to deployment/E2E tests. 6. Start policy-as-code diff tests for routing rules.
High-leverage 7. Implement a minimal competitor behavioral fingerprint and store it weekly. 8. Require blast-radius annotations on all new integration and E2E tests.
Bottom line
The next gains for Stella Ops testing are no longer about coverage—they’re about temporal correctness, policy drift control, replayability, and competitive awareness. Systems that fail now do so quietly, over time, and under sequence pressure. These additions close exactly those gaps.