test-strategy

# Test Strategy Coverage is a means; risk and failure detection are the decision criteria. ## Strategy loop 1. Identify critical user journeys, assets, contracts, dependencies, and recent change areas. 2. Score impact and likelihood; include data loss, privacy, money, access, safety, operational, and reputation failure modes. 3. Map each high-risk item to the cheapest test level that reaches the real failure: unit, contract, integration, component, browser, load, security, exploratory, or production monitoring. 4. Define fixtures, environment parity, deterministic data, test ownership, test oracle, and cleanup. 5. Set release gates and explicit exclusions. Include negative, boundary, retry, concurrency, migration, accessibility, and recovery paths when risk warrants them. 6. Reassess after incidents, architecture changes, dependency changes, and high-churn releases. ## Choose specialized test modes - Use **exploratory charters** when risks or failure shapes are not understood; time-box the session, record observations, then convert repeatable discoveries into automated checks. - Use **contract tests** at independently deployed consumer/provider seams; verify compatibility before deployment rather than duplicating implementation tests on both sides. - Classify **flaky tests** by product race, test race, data, environment, dependency, resource contention, or selector drift. Quarantine only with an owner, evidence, expiry, and a still-vis...