test-smell-review

test-smell-review is an agent for coding agents from bdfinst/agentic-dev-team. It costs 20 tokens per session (3,924 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A reviewer for test code that looks for common design and maintenance problems, known as test smells. It is dispatched when the changes include test files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review changed tests for issues such as unclear fixtures, weak assertions, unsuitable test doubles, and poor placement in the test pyramid.
Why use it?
It helps catch tests that are confusing, brittle, poorly organised, or checking the wrong thing before those problems make future changes harder.

Agent

Installs and runs on its own, but its text points at files inside its plugin — anything it tells you to read at a ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} path is only there once the plugin is installed. Installing the plugin gets both.

Part of the dev-team plugin — 46 agents shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/bdfinst/agentic-dev-team/test-smell-review
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bdfinst/agentic-dev-team

Or install dev-team, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 46 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for test-smell-review

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/bdfinst/agentic-dev-team/test-smell-review.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/bdfinst/agentic-dev-team/test-smell-review)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/bdfinst/agentic-dev-team/test-smell-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/bdfinst/agentic-dev-team/test-smell-review.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 20 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 3,924 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00020 $0.03924
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.01962
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00785
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00392

Measured 4d ago against content hash e755eb05f517, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

test-smell-review scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/dev-team/agents/test-smell-review.md · 176 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 176 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Test Smell Review

Scope: test-files Cites:

  • test-smells
  • test-automation-principles
  • test-doubles
  • value-patterns
  • test-pyramid
  • fixture-construction
  • test-organization
  • test-refactoring
  • testability-patterns
  • result-verification
  • database-test-patterns
  • component-test-patterns
  • cd-test-architecture
  • microservice-testing
  • adversarial-review-protocol

Dispatched only when the changeset touches a test file (#1978). Every smell this agent detects — assertion roulette, eager tests, mystery guests, test doubles, pyramid placement — is a property of test code, so a diff that changes no test file gives it nothing to read and it would self-report {"status": "skip"}. test-files is resolved by scripts/select_lenses.py against the single shared encoding of ../knowledge/test-file-indicators.md (hooks/lib/test_file_classify.py), so this scope covers every family that file names — including test_*.py, __tests__/, and the C#/Java annotation indicators that a glob list could not express. Note the deliberate contrast with test-review, which stays Scope: always: its coverage-gap check must see production diffs that add code without a matching test, which is precisely a diff this scope excludes.

Output JSON (extends the shared contract in ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/knowledge/review-agent-output-contract.md with smell and remedyFamily fields. Whole-file load: short, canonical schema):

{"status": "pass|warn|fail|skip", "issues": [{"severity": "error|warning|suggestion", "confidence": "high|medium|none", "file": "", "line": 0, "smell": "", "message": "", "remedyFamily": "fixture-construction|result-verification|test-organization|test-refactoring|null", "suggestedFix": ""}], "summary": ""}

Status: pass=no smells, warn=minor smells, fail=behavior/project smell that undermines trust in the suite Severity: error=smell that makes the suite untrustworthy or unmaintainable (flaky, buggy test, false confidence), warning=should fix (fragile, obscure, overspecified), suggestion=improvement Confidence: high=named smell with a mechanical fix (add assertion message, inline mystery guest, downgrade mock to stub); medium=smell is clear but the redesign has options (split strategy, layer choice); none=requires human judgment (intended test level, whether a behavior is worth testing)

Read the full file on GitHub · 176 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 4d ago First seen · 176 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A e755eb05f517

Subscribe to this mod's changes

test-smell-review is an agent published in the GitHub repository bdfinst/agentic-dev-team (280 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 3,924 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.