Testing and verification gates

Testing philosophy, fast vs race gates, mutation testing of safety guards, and Lima VM integration.

Verification in exocomp is grounded in execution. No change lands without demonstrated test output.

The testing gates

1. Fast commit gate (make check)

Runs automatically via git pre-commit hook or manually:

make check

Executes:

• gofmt formatting check
• go vet static analysis
• golangci-lint (if installed)
• go mod tidy -diff check
• Fast unit tests: go test -short ./...

2. Full race gate (make check-race)

Runs automatically on pre-push and gates all worktree merges to main:

make check-race

Runs the entire test suite with Go's race detector (go test -race ./...).

Mutation testing of safety guards

Invariant 5 dictates that guardrails live in the execution queue, not configuration.

To prevent tests from passing vacuously:

• Every safety guard test must carry a mutation check.
• A test asserting that destructive actions or unauthenticated tokens are rejected must fail if the security check in the code under test is commented out.

Infrastructure testing with Lima Linux VMs

Mocking remote SSH and Ansible runs in unit tests cannot prove behavior on real Linux kernels.

The repository includes Fedora Lima VM templates under test/lima/:

# Provision a dummy managed node
limactl start test/lima/fedora.yaml

# Run integration tests against real SSH/Ansible targets
go test -tags=integration ./test/lima/...

This validates:

• Real SSH fleet key authentication and known_hosts fingerprinting.
• Rootless Ansible execution with nono sandbox enforcement.
• Per-source venv isolation and Python interpreter resolution.