scrabble-game/docs/TESTING.md

Scrabble Game — Testing

How the project is tested and the gate every stage must pass. Read before adding tests or touching CI.

Layers

• Go unit tests — table-driven where it helps; testing + standard library. Every functional change ships with regression coverage. Run: go test -count=1 ./backend/... ./pkg/... ./gateway/... (the module list grows with the workspace).
• Integration (Stage 1+) — Postgres-backed tests behind the integration build tag spin a throwaway postgres:17-alpine via testcontainers-go. They live in backend/internal/inttest and run with go test -tags=integration -count=1 -p=1 ./backend/... (needs Docker), guarded by a separate CI workflow (integration.yaml; Ryuk disabled, serial). Slow.
• UI (introduced with the UI in Stage 7) — Vitest (unit) + Playwright (e2e), mirroring the chosen plain-Svelte + Vite toolchain. Stage 8 adds Vitest for the new FlatBuffers codecs (friend list, invitation, stats), the win-rate derivation and the GCG share/download choice, plus Playwright specs against the mock for the friends screen (code issue/redeem, accept a request), the lobby invitations section, the stats screen, profile editing, and the GCG export's finished-only visibility.
• Engine (Stage 2+) — correctness of scoring and move generation is owned by scrabble-solver's own GCG-backed tests. backend/internal/engine adds, on top of the embedded solver: per-variant smoke tests (load all three committed DAWGs and validate a known word, including Эрудит), bag draw/return determinism and exchange accounting, the Game end-conditions (empty bag with an empty rack, and six scoreless turns) with end-game rack scoring, and dictionary-independent history replay (ReplayBoard reproduces a full greedy game's final board from decoded records alone), and the resignation win/loss rule (the resigner keeps their score yet loses). The engine tests read the DAWGs from BACKEND_DICT_DIR (or the sibling scrabble-solver checkout) and fail loudly when it is absent.
• Game domain (Stage 3+) — backend/internal/game adds pure unit tests (the GCG writer, the away-window / effective-deadline boundaries, the hint budget, the live-game cache and per-game lock, payload round-trips) plus Postgres-backed integration tests in inttest (full lifecycle to a natural end, journal-replay equivalence, the turn-timeout sweep with away-window grace, resign win/loss and statistics, the hint allowance-then-wallet policy, word-check and complaint capture, and per-game-lock serialisation). Stage 4 adds the engine's multi-player drop-out cases (continue after one resign, last-survivor win, the tile-disposition bag effect) and a domain integration test for a 3-player timeout that continues. The engine also gains a Candidates ranked/decoded test (Stage 5).
• Social & lobby (Stage 4+) — backend/internal/social unit-tests the chat content filter (links/emails/phones plus obfuscated forms) and backend/internal/lobby unit-tests the in-memory matchmaker (FIFO pairing, cancel, per-variant pools, plus the Stage 5 robot substitution reaper and Poll delivery) with fake game-creator and robot-provider seams. Postgres-backed inttest covers the friend request/accept lifecycle with the block/toggle guards, the per-user block (and its severing of friendships), chat post/list with the IP, content and block-visibility rules, the nudge turn/rate-limit rules, the invitation flow (all-accept starts the game, decline cancels, lazy expiry, inviter-only cancel), and the email confirm-code flow (request/confirm, taken email, expiry and attempt-cap) with a fixture mailer. Stage 8 adds the befriend-an-opponent gate (a request needs a shared game), the permanent decline and 30-day re-send rule, the one-time friend code (issue/redeem, self/single-use, decline-bypass), ListInvitations, the zero-value GetStats, and the GCG finished-only gate.
• Robot (Stage 5+) — backend/internal/robot unit-tests the pure strategy: the ≈ 40% play-to-win split over many seeds, the right-skewed move-delay (bounds, ~10-min median, determinism), the margin selection (win/lose, in-band and out-of-band fallbacks, no-play exchange/pass), the sleep window with drift and the midnight wrap, and mix restart-stability. Postgres-backed inttest drives a robot through a full auto-match to a natural end (asserting a robot statistics row), the matchmaker substitution end-to-end (enqueue → reap → [human, robot], discoverable via Poll), and a proactive 12-hour nudge.
• Gateway & contracts (Stage 6+) — backend/internal/notify unit-tests the hub fan-out (delivery, overflow drop, unsubscribe) and the FlatBuffers event constructors (payload round-trip). gateway/... unit-tests are hermetic (no real network — an httptest fake backend and fixtures): the Telegram initData HMAC validator (genuine, tampered, wrong-token, stale), the session cache (hit/miss/fallback, TTL re-resolve, invalidate), the rate limiter (burst, per-key isolation, per-window), the push hub (per-user routing, overflow, unsubscribe), the transcode round-trips (FlatBuffers↔JSON, X-User-ID forwarding, nested GameView, domain-code surfacing), the admin Basic-Auth reverse proxy (401 / forward), and a full Connect Execute path end to end (guest auth, unauthenticated rejection, unknown message type). The backend gains the guest lifecycle (a guest plays an auto-match to a natural end yet accrues no statistics) and the email-as-login flow (request/verify, returning user) in inttest. Stage 8 adds gateway transcode round-trips for the new social/account operations (friends list, friend code issue/redeem, invitation create, stats, GCG, the profile-update away round-trip) and a notify-event constructor round-trip.
• Admin & dictionary ops (Stage 10) — backend/internal/adminconsole unit-tests the template renderer over every page plus the embedded asset; backend/internal/engine adds the dictionary hot-reload cases (LoadAvailable loads only the present variants, OpenWithVersions scans version subdirectories, a reload registers a new version and moves "latest"); backend/internal/server unit-tests the console's same-origin CSRF guard; the gateway adds the verbatim /_gm Basic-Auth proxy (401 / forward, path preserved) and the h2c console mount (routed when configured, 404 when not). Postgres-backed inttest drives the complaint resolution → dictionary-change pipeline (file → resolve with a disposition → pending change → mark applied), the admin list/count read queries, and the /_gm console over HTTP (pages render; a resolve POST needs a same-origin header).
• Observability & performance (Stage 12) — pkg/telemetry unit-tests the exporter selection (none/stdout/otlp build providers; OTLP constructs with no collector; the nil-runtime fallback). The domain metrics are exercised through a manual sdkmetric reader: backend/internal/game and …/social assert the counters and histograms record with the right variant/kind attributes, and gateway/internal/connectsrv asserts edge_request_duration by message_type/ result. Config tests cover the new telemetry env vars (backend/gateway/connector — otlp now accepted, an unsupported exporter rejected) and the guest-reaper knobs. Postgres-backed inttest drives the guest reaper end to end (an abandoned guest is reaped; a too-young guest, a seated guest and a durable account are kept).
• Load test & resource baseline (R2) — a reusable loadtest/ module (scrabble/loadtest) is the pre-release stress harness. It seeds a large account population with pre-created sessions directly in Postgres (token hashes matching backend/internal/session), drives virtual players through the edge protocol — real games assembled via invitations, mid-ranked legal moves generated locally by the embedded scrabble-solver (the edge carries no board, so the client replays history) — plus a fraction of nudge/chat/check-word/draft/profile/stats ops, and a gateway-hammer that verifies the rate limiter. Its own Go unit tests cover the pure pieces (token hashing, board replay vs. board.Parse, rack reconstruction, mid-rank selection, the report); the DAWG-backed move test runs under BACKEND_DICT_DIR (as the engine tests do). It is not part of the per-PR suite's behavioural assertions: it runs ad hoc as a one-shot container against the contour, producing a trip report (bugs
  • a resource baseline) read off the cAdvisor + postgres_exporter Grafana dashboard added to the contour in R2. See ../loadtest/README.md.

Principles

• A green run must not depend on cached state: use -count=1 in CI.
• Tests that need infrastructure fail loudly (t.Fatal) when it is unavailable rather than silently skipping coverage.
• No network or real platform calls in unit tests; validate platform credentials behind an interface seam and test with fixtures.

Per-stage CI gate

Every completed stage is exercised on gitea.iliadenisov.ru before it is marked done in ../PLAN.md:

1. Commit the stage on its feature/* branch.
2. Push to origin.
3. Watch the run to completion — never hand-roll a poll loop: python3 ~/.claude/bin/gitea-ci-watch.py (launch in the background).
4. Only after every workflow that fired is green may the stage be marked done.