designing-tests

A guide to planning software tests, including unit tests for individual pieces of code, integration tests for components working together, and end-to-end tests for complete user flows. TDD means writing tests before the code; BDD describes behavior in terms users can understand.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding features, improving an existing test suite, choosing TDD or BDD, designing API or browser tests, or investigating unreliable tests.
Why use it?
It helps choose the right kinds and number of tests instead of testing everything the same way. It also covers coverage planning, test infrastructure, flaky tests, and testing approaches.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/cloudai-x/opencode-workflow/designing-tests
Any agent
npx skills add CloudAI-X/opencode-workflow --skill designing-tests
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CloudAI-X/opencode-workflow

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,822 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 $0.00038 $0.02822
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.01411
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00564
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00282

Measured 2d ago against content hash c1dad781c6b9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

designing-tests 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 2d 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.

skills/designing-tests/SKILL.md · 469 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 469 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Designing Tests

Strategies and patterns for designing effective, maintainable test suites.

When to Use This Skill

  • Planning test coverage for new features
  • Choosing between testing approaches (TDD, BDD)
  • Designing integration or E2E tests
  • Improving existing test suites
  • Setting up testing infrastructure
  • Debugging flaky tests

The Testing Pyramid

                 ┌─────────┐
                 │   E2E   │  ← Few, slow, expensive
                 │  Tests  │     (Selenium, Playwright)
                 ├─────────┤
                 │         │
              ┌──┤ Integr- │  ← Some, medium speed
              │  │  ation  │     (API tests, DB tests)
              │  │  Tests  │
              │  ├─────────┤
              │  │         │
              │  │  Unit   │  ← Many, fast, cheap
              │  │  Tests  │     (Pure functions, isolated)
              └──┴─────────┘
Level Speed Scope Quantity Purpose
Unit ~ms Single function/class Many (70-80%) Logic correctness
Integration ~s Multiple components Some (15-20%) Component interaction
E2E ~10s+ Full system Few (5-10%) User flows work

Test-Driven Development (TDD)

The Red-Green-Refactor Cycle

     ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
     │                                 │
     ▼                                 │
┌─────────┐    ┌─────────┐    ┌────────┴──┐
│   RED   │───▶│  GREEN  │───▶│ REFACTOR  │
│  Write  │    │  Make   │    │  Clean    │
│ failing │    │   it    │    │   up      │
│  test   │    │  pass   │    │  code     │
└─────────┘    └─────────┘    └───────────┘

TDD Best Practices

  1. Write the test first - Don't write production code without a failing test
  2. Write the minimal test - One behavior per test
  3. Write the minimal code - Just enough to pass
  4. Refactor ruthlessly - Clean up after green
  5. Run tests frequently - After every small change

Read the full file on GitHub · 469 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. 2d ago First seen · 469 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A c1dad781c6b9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

designing-tests is a skill published in the GitHub repository CloudAI-X/opencode-workflow (274 stars, last pushed 7mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 2,822 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

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